


Wings of Wax

by StormDancer



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Thieves, Angst, Anxiety, Heist, M/M, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, a suspicious lack of plot for a heist, discussions of offscreen OC death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-23 13:18:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16159736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormDancer/pseuds/StormDancer
Summary: The fact of the matter is, Tyson isn't the hero of his story.Gabe might be the hero of Tyson’s story. If you asked him five years ago, Tyson would have blushed and stammered and said that no, of course not, Gabe is not the hero of his story, what are you talking about?Now—now Tyson is older. Now, Tyson knows that Gabe might be the hero of his own story, but in Tyson’s—he might be the protagonist, but Tyson’s not sure who the hero is. He’s pretty sure there isn’t one. He’s pretty sure the hero died in a fire four years ago, and he knows who killed him.





	Wings of Wax

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Springsteen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Springsteen/pseuds/Springsteen) in the [boysarehot](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/boysarehot) collection. 



> Many thanks to Springsteen for the excellent prompt! I went a little darker than maybe the prompt indicates, but there's nothing I love more than a good heist AU (especially where you can ignore the plot). 
> 
> Don't know anyone involved with this and my representation has nothing to do with the real people who share these characters' names, don't own, all of that good stuff. Also I handwaved basically all computer stuff, so don't try that at home, I guess. 
> 
> If you have any questions about the warnings in the tags, you can message me on [ tumblr](http://fanforthefics.tumblr.com/ask).
> 
>  
> 
> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> spy or heist au! Are they art thieves commissioned to forge and steal a famous painting? Rival spies with a complicated past lying low on the same tropical island which has suddenly become a hotbed of criminal activity? Is it a love story between a charming, risk-taking field operative and the exasperated tech genius trying to keep their crush a secret while also trying to stop the spy from getting shot at every day? It's entirely up to you. Pairings above are a suggestion, I'm really open to any interpretation of this vague prompt.

The call comes on a Tuesday.

Tyson doesn’t look up from his computer, just hits the speaker button on his phone so he can keep typing. He needs to get this project in by Friday, but it isn’t particularly challenging. He can talk to an old friend and type at the same time. He can—and has—done most things and type at the same time, which some people have found annoying, but those people aren’t here.

Instead, he has his computer, and the picture window that makes up the wall in front of him with a view of the lake down below his house, and he nearly slept through the night last night. It’s not a particularly exciting day, but none are, anymore. It is a decent day, though, and that’s the most he can ask for. Especially with his best friend on the phone, when he’s been on radio silence for a while.

So he’s smiling as he answers with a, “What’s up, dawg?”

A breath on the other side of the phone, and instincts Tyson put away four years ago go tense. “He’s out.”

Tyson’s fingers stumble to a halt on the keyboard.

“What?”

Nate takes another breath. “He’s out,” he repeats. “I saw him. He came by.”

Tyson takes a long, slow inhale. Tries to make it be now, not four years ago. Stares at his screen. The code there is good. Solid. Simple. “Great, he’s out, good for him.”

“Tys…”

“I don’t care,” Tyson insists. It’s a lie, and they both know it, because Tyson will always care, but he hopes Nate will let him have the lie. He looks up from his screen, out at the lake, then quickly back down again. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it was good to see him.” Nate, always with his too big heart. Tyson can’t blame him. It’s never been Nate’s fault. Nate never had to live with any of it. “Tys, he has a job.”

“Of course he does.” Tyson rolls his eyes and, out of instinct, does a quick check on the encryptions on his phone. It is, of course, holding. Tyson might be a mess in most of his life, but he’s good where it counts. “Out of prison for a day and he’s got a job planned.”

“I think he’s been planning this one for a while.” Nate pauses. “Four years, give or take.”

Tyson closes his eyes. He knows what this is about, then. “That would do it.” Then he swallows, and turns away from the lake, so he can’t see it anymore. “Thanks for letting me know.”

He can hear Nate hum. Nate has a great poker face except when he’s with friends. “There’s more.”

“Nate…”

“It’s a good job,” Nate says, sounding sheepish. “And—I want it too, Tys.”

“Good.” Tyson swallows. Rests his hands on the desk. It’s not four years ago, he reminds himself. He’s not that person anymore. “He deserves it.”

“Yeah. And—his plan needs tech support.”

Tyson’s hands convulse again. He forces himself to stare at the bookshelf, filled with books he’s never read. “Okay. I can recommend someone to you.”

“We need the best.”

“And I’ll recommend you the best.”

“Tyson, we need—”

“No.” Tyson makes himself as firm as he can. “I’m out, Nate. You know that.”

“I know.” They’ve had this argument before, over and over again for the last four years. Well, three years. That first year, not even Nate could fool himself that Tyson was in any sort of stable state. “But—well. He doesn’t. Or he thinks he can convince you otherwise.”

Tyson can’t help bolting to his feet. “Nate, tell me you didn’t—”

“I don’t want this without you either,” Nate says, and Tyson is going to kill him. “He headed out this afternoon.”

Tyson can’t help turning around again, looking at the lake. There’s a dock there, he knows, out of sight but not out of mind. “You sent him here?” he demands. “Nate, I can’t—”

“You’ll have to face him eventually.”

“Yeah, at your funeral,” Tyson retorts. “Why the hell did you give me away?” 

Nate lets out a long breath, and Tyson can hear him moving around, hundreds of miles away. “Because you’ve been a mess for four years, and I want you to be happy?”

“I’ve been a mess my whole life,” Tyson tells him. “Why would this be any different?”

“Because it’s Gabe,” Nate says, and Tyson’s body does something just hearing the name. Four years, and he thought he was okay, thought he was better, and apparently the mere mention of a name is taking him out at the knees. “And he’s always been different.”

///

Once he knows, it’s not hard to trace him down. Gabe’s changed his phone and his cards and almost everything, but Tyson is very very good, and so it’s easy to find his flight. To see when he gets off, when he gets into a car. When that car starts to pull up in front of the gates.

Tyson inhales, exhales, and looks in the mirror. What will Gabe see, looking at him? He’s four years older than he was, and he thinks the years have been comparatively kind, but he’s still older. And his lifestyle isn’t the sort of mobile, active one that someone like Nate’s is.

And it doesn’t matter, he reminds himself. He doesn’t want to see Gabe. He doesn’t care about Gabe. He’s out. He won’t be back in. Not after last time.

So he only runs his hand through his hair once, then hits the button to open the gate, and goes downstairs.

He hears the car pull up. Hears the car door open, close. Hears the footsteps up the walk.

Then—the bell, and it chimes throughout the house, a silly little anachronism, and Tyson takes a breath, and goes to the door.

It’s not four years ago, he reminds himself—and opens the door.

He’s the same. Or he’s not the same, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s still—he’s still Gabe, with the gorgeous hair and neat beard and broad shoulders and sparkling eyes and that devastating smile, like he’s never been more pleased to see anyone than he is to see Tyson. He’s still Gabe, in the same way that’s pierced Tyson’s heart since he was barely more than a boy.

“Tyson,” he breathes, like a benediction. “Tys, it’s—” He takes a step forward, and Tyson sways, pulled into him—then musters all his strength, and steps back.

Gabe freezes. “Tyson?” he says again, and this time it’s confused. Tyson has probably never moved away from him before.

“Hi Gabe,” Tyson gets out. “It’s been a while.”

///

Gabe smiles. Swallows, and steps back, straightens his shoulders. Tyson has known him for almost a decade, and he knows what Gabe looks like, slipping into the easy confidence of the con. It hurts a little, that he has to do it with Tyson—but this distance is what Tyson wants. What he needs.

“Hi,” he says. “Can I come in?”

“I think you already have,” Tyson replies, but he steps aside. He was never going to turn Gabe away from his door. He’s trying, but he’s not that strong.

Gabe comes in, those bright blue eyes looking everywhere as he surveys Tyson’s house. Tyson wants to shove him out. Tyson wants to demand what he sees. Tyson wants to sleep and knows he won’t be able to tonight.

“Thirsty?” is what Tyson says, and Gabe shrugs but nods.

“I could have something.”

“Great.” Tyson turns to go to the kitchen. He can hear Gabe following him. He’ll give Gabe a drink, and then he’ll leave, and Tyson can go back to his projects and his home and forget about everything he was other than Nate.

“You’ve done well for yourself,” Gabe says, as they walk down the hall. “Is that Pollock real?”

Tyson shakes his head. He can feel Gabe’s gaze between his shoulder blades. “That’s one of PK’s,” he says. “The Boccioni’s real, though. And bought.”

“Honestly?”

“With honest money all the way down,” Tyson says. The kitchen is bright as the rest of the house—Tyson had always loved natural light—and the sunlight shines off the chrome of the appliances. Tyson had been sure to clean it this morning. This is what he wants Gabe to see, not the mess it usually is. Not the mess it is in his head right now. Fuck, Gabe is here. Gabe Landeskog, in his tight suits and charm and all the things that always spun Tyson around, leaning against the island in his kitchen. “I can do that now.”

“I always knew you could,” Gabe tells him, smiling, and Tyson warms and hates himself for it.

“Here.” Tyson shoves the glass of water at him. Then he gets a LaCroix out of the fridge for himself, because he needs something to do with his hands. This is why he needs a keyboard. If he was looking at a keyboard he could handle Gabe being here.

“Thanks,” Gabe says. He’s still watching Tyson. “So—this is what you do now?”

“My job? Yes, Gabriel. That is what I do.” Tyson bites at his tongue as Gabe’s smile flickers. No, no fond use of Gabe’s full name. He can’t fall back into that.

“Sit here all day. With your computers.”

“I have friends.” Gabe hums, like he’s not sure he believes him. “I do!” Tyson insists, and he’s only lying a little. He’s a con. He’s allowed to. “Ask Nate. I have friends and work and—all this.” He spreads out his hands to demonstrate the house, the life he’s built brick by brick around the flaming ruins of his old life.

“I’m sure you do,” Gabe says. Placating. Condescending. Tyson always hated him like this. “It seems very fulfilling.”

“It is,” Tyson tells him. He’s not lying. This life is fulfilling. Simple and easy and fulfilling and even-keeled and if there aren’t many highs other than the satisfaction of a job well done the only lows are in his nightmares.

“You always said you’d get out eventually,” Gabe goes on. He runs his finger over the top of the glass, and looks at Tyson over it. Considering. Like he looks at a mark, before he goes in for the kill.

“We all said that.” It’s every con’s dream, after all. Or at least, the one they all say. One more score, and then that’ll be it. Tyson had never seriously thought he’d do it, though. He thought he’d be young and brilliant forever, that they’d all run together for eternity, a step in front of the law and laughing at it. He’d never seen a time when he didn’t want more, want to go again. He’d been very young then. He’s not much older now, but he feels tired. “Get to the point, Gabe. Some of us have a job to do. Or like, a real job. An honest one.”

“Nate told you I have a job?”

“Yeah.” Tyson raises his eyebrows. “Did you think you were going to ambush me?”

Gabe’s smile twists. “I know I’m never getting between you and Nate,” he says. Tyson smiles into his can. Fuck right he won’t. Not even Tyson at his most besotted would let that happen. “What did he tell you?”

“That you were coming up here to convince me to go in on it.” Tyson shakes his head. “That it was—a revenge sort of job.”

Gabe’s fingers clench, even if his smile doesn’t falter. “He put me in prison, Tys.”

“Yeah.” Tyson knows. Tyson’s not any fonder of him than Gabe is, than Nate is, than any of them are. Maybe less fond. He knows exactly what sort of person Patrick Roy is. “I know. Go forth and avenge, I’ll look forward to reading about it in the paper. Well, on the website. I don’t get an actual paper.”

“You don’t want revenge?” Gabe asks, leaning forward, intent as always.

Tyson sighs, and drums his fingers over the side of the can. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t,” he explains. “But you should do it without me.”

“I can’t do it without you,” Gabe retorts, and Tyson laughs mirthlessly.

“Like you couldn’t do the Stockholm job without me?” he asks, and Gabe’s mouth clicks shut. His eyes scan over Tyson, like he’s seeing him again. “Yeah, I thought so. Find someone else, Gabe. I’m out.”

“You can’t really want to be out for good.” Gabe demands. “Come on, aren’t you bored?”

“Of course I am,” Tyson retorts, because he’s not going to bother lying about something they both know. “I’m bored, and that’s what I want. Bored means I don’t—” Don’t have nightmares. Don’t risk it happening again. Don’t think about you and your smile and how you seem to care. “Don’t get caught,” he finishes lamely. Gabe knows it’s not what he meant.

“Tys—” he starts, but Tyson cuts him off.

“It’s late. You can stay the night,” he says, and sets down his can. “But I’m out, Gabe. I’m not going back in.”

Gabe smiles, and it’s his mark smile, the one that always gets him what he wants. It’s funny, Tyson thinks. He’s never used that smile on him before. He never needed to. It’s not what worked on Tyson. It doesn’t mean Tyson doesn’t recognize a Gabe who’s charming him into getting what he wants. “Don’t you want to know the job, at least?”

“No.”

“You aren’t curious?”

Of course Tyson is. “No.”

“Don’t you want to know why we need you?”

“No,” Tyson lies again, and he’s always been a bad liar—there’s a reason he stays in the van—but he has to try. “Don’t, Gabe.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’ve got work to do. You can—I don’t know, find something to amuse you.”

He backs out of the room, leaving Gabe behind.

And then, because he’s a masochist, flips on the security cameras that show the kitchen, back in his office. Maybe it’s creepy, but whatever, if Gabe doesn’t know Tyson’s got cameras everywhere in his own damn house than he doesn’t know Tyson at all and he deserves to be spied on.

Gabe’s looking at the water, his brow furrowed, like he’s confused. His shoulders are slumped a little. This clearly isn’t what he expected. He expected Tyson to roll over for him, like he always had before; it’s a fair assumption. But not anymore.

Then he looks up, and his gaze sweeps the room, until it focuses right on the camera, and he’s looking right at Tyson. Tyson yelps, even though it’s not like Gabe can see him back. “I’m going to convince you,” he tells Tyson, with a smirk, and Tyson shuts off the feed before he can do something stupid.

 _It’s not going to work_ , he messages Nate, before he starts working.

_Landy looks good, though._

_I’m not going back. Not to the job, and not to him._

_Does it have to be to that?_

Tyson sighs. Gives in to temptation, and looks back at the cameras—Gabe’s left the kitchen, and is wandering the house now, his hand stroking over a table as he passes. Tyson always loved Gabe’s hands, his long clever light fingers. He’s seen him pick a lock like he was playing the piano.  He’s wondered if he could play Tyson like that. Even now, he can’t help it.

_Because it’s me and it’s him. It’s always going to be like that._

///

Even with Gabe in his house he falls asleep on the couch in his office before it’s completely dark. He’s always tired, nowadays, and it’s better, on places that aren’t beds. He doesn’t get nightmares there.

He wakes up a few hours later, not really totally rested but better. When he flips through the cameras though, to find Gabe, he can’t see him—his stuff is still there, and so is his car, but Gabe’s not on camera. Tyson flips past faster. How can he not be there? Gabe’s good, but there aren’t holes in Tyson’s security.

Then he looks up, and sees the movement near the lake.

Of course he’s there. Of course he found it. Or not found it—he’s been there before. Not here, not this exact place, but he’s been on this lake before.

God, they’d been young then—just off of their first few jobs together as a crew, scattered to the winds under Nate’s direction to lie low until the heat went off them for a while, and he and Gabe assigned here together, because Gabe had gotten a bad gouge shimmying into a vent and Nate didn’t trust him to take care of it alone and Nate was a bro and knew that what Tyson wanted.

They’d had fun that week, playing in the lake, watching TV as Gabe complained about his leg like it was going to fall off and Tyson taking some odd jobs in between because he could really do most of his job from anywhere and it was fun, and both of them planning, as Gabe’s ideas spread out in front of them and Tyson eager to make them a reality. He wasn’t Nate, wasn’t a planner like him and Gabe were, but he got them what they needed. He had always gotten them what they needed.

Tyson hadn’t thought too hard about why he came back here, after everything. Maybe he’s a masochist. Maybe he wants the reminder.

He’s leaning towards the former, because he finds himself getting up, going downstairs, towards the lake. It’s dark and quiet, except for one boat in the distance; the only light the moon and that from Tyson’s house and the other houses in the distance—no one else is insane enough to come down here in the early March chill. Tyson can see Gabe sitting on the edge of the dock, his pale hair bright in the moonlight. He’s wearing a white t-shirt under his dark hoodie and it glows too, like he’s the moon itself, come down to sit on Tyson’s dock.

“You’re going to have to be quieter than that if you’re going to push me in,” Gabe says, before Tyson says anything. Tyson rolls his eyes.

“I know better than to sneak up on you,” he tells him, and walks forward until he’s standing next to Gabe. “If I wanted to off you, I’d have activated my spinning tops of doom.”

Gabe tilts his head up to look at Tyson. A smile’s quirking at his lips. “Do you actually have those?”

“I’m not telling if I do.”

“You’ve finally gone full supervillain.” Gabe clucks his teeth, shaking his head. “I guess we always knew it was inevitable.”

“Hey, if one of us was going to go supervillain, it was definitely going to be EJ,” Tyson counters, and Gabe laughs. The sound echoes out across the lake.

Gabe pats at the dock next to him. “Come on, sit down.”

“It’s cold,” Tyson complains, but he does. Because he wanted to. Because that was why he came here. Not because Gabe asked.

“It’s fresh.” Gabe keeps his head tips back, inhales deeply. “I haven’t tasted air this fresh in—years.”

“Oh, right. I guess there aren’t many scenic vistas in prison.”

Gabe snorts. “Not so many, no.”

It’s quiet. Tyson shouldn’t ask. Tyson shouldn’t care. Tyson should still be as viscerally, excruciatingly angry at Gabe as he had been right after Stockholm.

But it’s been years, and the anger’s faded into a low, throbbing pain that only bursts into agony when Tyson pokes. He loved Gabe a lot longer than he’d been angry at him. He’s too tired to be angry all the time. “Are you okay?” he asks.

Gabe shrugs. “I’m more okay than I have been in years.”

“They say prison changes a man.”

“You haven’t seen my tattoos.” Tyson’s gaze goes down, involuntarily, to look for signs of ink; Gabe’s lips curve into a smile. It’s a knowing smile, one that invites Tyson into the joke. One that invites him in. And Tyson can feel himself drifting in, like always—into the old cycle of flirtation and helpless longing and being so so easy for Gabe.

He can’t do that anymore, though. He won’t. So instead of retorting, he just shakes his head, and stays quiet.  

Gabe tilts his head at him.  “Are you okay?” Gabe asks. Tyson snorts. Okay is a relative term.

“Yeah, obviously. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Tyson can’t really see Gabe’s face in the moonlight, but he knows what it feels like. When Gabe the leader comes out. “I know what it looks like when you’re happy, Tys. This isn’t it.”

“I am happy.”

“No, you aren’t.” Gabe insists. Stubborn, always so stubborn, so sure he’s right.

“Why do you care?” Tyson retorts. Maybe it’s unfair. Maybe it matters more that they were friends for years, and that Gabe did care for him, in his way, even if it wasn’t in the same way Tyson cared for him. Maybe the last hours they’d been together didn’t counter that out.

Gabe’s hurt face makes it clear what he thinks. “I only ever want you to be happy.” Tyson snorts again. “What? I do!”

“Funny way you have of showing that,” Tyson tells him, his fingers starting to curl into fists on his thighs. “With—” He chokes. He can’t think about it. If he says something about it he’ll think about it and then he won’t be able to stop thinking about it—

“Tys. Tyson. Tyson!” Gabe snaps, and it’s instinct to listen to that. To feel Gabe’s hands on his arms, his shoulders, his face, shaking him. To open his eyes and just see Gabe’s face, filling up his field of vision, looking concerned and focused and years ago Tyson would have sold his soul to have Gabe look at him like this. “Tyson, are you okay?”

Tyson takes a long breath, then another. “Yeah.”

“That wasn’t okay,” Gabe snaps. He’s puffing up like he always did when he was getting protective. “That was—”

“I’m fine,” Tyson snaps, and tugs away from Gabe’s hands. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“Tys—”

“Tell me about the job,” Tyson interrupts, because he can’t have Gabe asking him more about that, and if there’s one thing that can always distract Gabe, it’s that.

Gabe nods, slowly, his brows drawing together, but he starts talking. It is, like all Gabe’s jobs, well put together—a little crazy, a little reckless, but solid. Gabe’s good at what he does. And Tyson can hear Nate in it too, when Nate comes in to temper Gabe’s recklessness. It sounds like it’ll work.

“You don’t need me for that,” Tyson tells him, when he’s finished with his pitch. “Any reasonably good hacker can do that. You don’t—”

“I do,” Gabe cuts in. “We do. I don’t trust anyone else to get it done. I don’t trust anyone else with the crew.”

Tyson lets out a long breath. Gabe knows how to work him. For Gabe, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—do it, not anymore. For himself, no. But for the crew… “I’ll find you the best replacement there is,” he promises. “Someone better than me.” There are plenty of people on that list.

“Why?” Gabe demands. “Why won’t you—”

“Because I’m out!”

“No you aren’t!” Gabe snaps back. “No one’s ever out. Not really.”

“I am!”

“So you don’t miss it?” Gabe asks, and his voice goes low and tempting—Tyson’s heard him seduce too many marks to count with that voice. “The thrill. The challenge. All of us, working together. Getting back at someone who—”

“Missing it isn’t the point.” Tyson’s breath comes out ragged. God, does he miss it—he misses it like an addict searching for his fix, and all his projects and the little games he does to amuse himself don’t make up for it. “I just—I can’t. Not again.”

“You could, though. You’re the best, Tyson.”

“How can you say that?” Tyson demands, and starts to tap his foot against the dock. Gabe of all people knows how not the best he is. How Gabe shouldn’t be asking him this, should be getting someone who won’t let them down. Who will be able to do his job.

“Because you are. You’re the best for us,” Gabe corrects, and he’s looking at Tyson like he means it, and—fuck, Tyson can almost believe him. He tries to feel angry, to counter it—tries to remember what Gabe did—but it still reverberates in him. Gabe’s always been good at that. At making him believe things. Then, “The best for me,” Gabe adds, and Tyson actually winces. “Come on, Tys. Don’t you want revenge, for what he did? Don’t you want to see if we can do it?”

Tyson does. God, does Tyson ever. He wants, and he’s wanted for four years, and he _can’t_. His fingers dig into the dock, like that will ground him here.

“Do you really want us to do it without you?” Gabe asks, and his voice is a purr now, low and tempting, and Tyson’s pretty sure Gabe doesn’t entirely get why that one hits home, but—but if something goes wrong, and Tyson isn’t there—that would be something else on his conscience, and that he couldn’t live with. If he made that mistake too. If he’s there, maybe he can—he’ll be careful, and he can double check everything, and bring someone else in if he has to.

Or maybe that’s an excuse, and he’s just an addict, and he’s never had any willpower when it comes to Gabe.

“One rule,” Tyson says, and turns to Gabe. Gabe lets out a small, triumphant noise. “I’m serious, Gabe.”

“Okay. Your rule.” Gabe puts on a straight face, but he can’t hide the smile in the corners of his eyes, his mouth. Tyson’s always been able to see through to his smiles, especially when they’re for Tyson. He wishes he couldn’t.

“You don’t lie to me.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“If you lie to me, if you try to con me, if you do anything like that—I’m out. I’ll leave.” It’s probably an empty threat—Tyson’s not going to leave his boys in the lurch—but he means it nonetheless.

Gabe nods. “Okay.”

“You have to promise me, Gabe.” Tyson leans forward. He’s going to have a nightmare tonight, he can feel it. “No more lying.”

Gabe must see that Tyson’s actually serious, because he nods again. “I won’t. And about Stockholm, if I’d known, I would never have—”

“Don’t.” Tyson shakes his head, then he gets up. If he’s leaving, he has shit to do. He doesn’t want to sleep deeply tonight anyway. “I need to finish things up and pack. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Gabe smiles at him, and it’s not his con smile, it’s the real one, the one that sneaks out at the edges and makes him shine. “Sit with me a few more minutes. I want to hear about what honest Tyson’s life has been.”

Gabe is smiling up at him in the moonlight, ignoring how cold it is, at this lake where they’d spent so many happy days, when Tyson had first thought _maybe_ and doomed his heart forever, and—“No,” Tyson says, and Gabe’s smile fades, not into sadness as much as confusion. “No, I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll get myself on your flight.”

“I didn’t get a flight back,” Gabe says, slowly.

“Then I’ll get both of us a flight back,” Tyson retorts. “I’ll email you and Nate the info. Good night, Gabe.”

“Tyson?” Gabe says, but it’s to Tyson’s back, and he closes his eyes and reminds himself not to turn around as he walks away.

///

“I don’t want to hear it,” Tyson tells Nate, as he sets his suitcase down in the living room of Nate’s suite in the Vail hotel, down the mountain from Roy’s resort.  

Nate’s clearly trying not to grin. “Hear what?”

“Nothing,” Tyson warns. He knows.

“Okay, nothing,” Nate agrees, then takes a step forward and sweeps Tyson into a hug. Tyson hugs back, letting his face drop into the comforting, solid shape of Nate’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you, man.”

“Good to see you too.” Tyson tells his shoulder. He can do this, he tells himself. He can do this, and if he can’t, Nate will get him out. Take that, he tells last night’s nightmares. “I’m still mad at you.”

“I know,” Nate agrees. “I know, and I’m sorry.”

“You owe me so much.”

“Okay,” Nate agrees.

“So much,” Tyson repeats. Gabe doesn’t really know what it’s costing Tyson to be here—Nate doesn’t either, not all of it, because Tyson hadn’t wanted him to see that,  but he knows some of it.

“I know,” Nate says again, and Tyson takes another long breath.  

The door shuts, and Tyson lets go of Nate to see—but it’s just Gabe, coming in behind them. He’s watching them with an odd look, something that’s half a smile and half confusion. “Hey,” he tells Nate, who nods back. Then he smirks. “Told you I could do it.”

It’s a clear invitation for Tyson to sputter and deny that he’s got no willpower where Gabe’s concerned, to fall back into their old patterns of teasing and flirting.

“So where are we?” Tyson asks instead, and Gabe’s brow furrows again. Nate’s lips twitch a little, but he answers,

“Everyone else is coming in today, except for the Willy—he’s in on something else, he’ll be here in a few days. And Lauren’s on standby, but she’s busy in Milan and I don’t think we’ll need her to spin until after the job’s done. I got some of the blueprints, but Tys, I need the—”

“I sent them to you when we were in the car,” Tyson tells him. “The most recent blueprints, and what I could get from their security firm. It’s not bad, but I think there’s more. I’m going to dig in.”

“You did all that last night?” Gabe asks, leaning over Nate’s shoulder as he checks his email to see the files Tyson’s sent. He really needs to work on their servers—they’re encrypted, obviously, but that was just his base encryption he does as a default, not what they need for a real job. And he doesn’t really trust some of the kids not to have accidentally gotten a new phone that wasn’t properly covered.

Tyson shrugs. “It wasn’t that much.”

“It’s great, Tyson,” Gabe tells him, all earnest and smiling, and Tyson blinks and shakes his head.

“So what’s next?” he asks.

“We need to get the—”

“No, that should wait for EJ, Tys should—”

Tyson leaves Nate and Gabe to their planning double talk, and gets to unpacking his laptops. He has his own room, of course, which will get his clothes, but most of his computers will live here until he moves to the van.

Then he’s got his computer out and Gabe and Nate are still doing their thing, so he starts in on the hotel—Nate’s great but he very will might be using the hotel wifi on a VPN. It’s easy work, routine—it’s not like he was particularly rusty, despite how much he wishes he is—so he still hears, despite Gabe’s attempt to speak quietly,

“Is he okay?”

Nate snorts. “What’s okay?”

“He just seems—different.”

“He—”

“He’s right here,” Tyson interrupts, because he doesn’t want to know what Nate is going to tell Gabe. Gabe doesn’t get to know that about him yet. “Nate, get off the network, I’m going to hook you up again.”

“Yes sir,” Nate tells him, and Tyson chuckles as Nate goes to turn off his computer. He doesn’t look at Gabe.

///

Everyone else trickles in over the next few hours, from wherever they were across the globe—EJ’s freshly tanned from a vacation on his farm, the rookies—who aren’t rookies anymore, but Tyson will always think of them that way—bounce in bragging excitedly about their latest job and did they see and Gabe how are you how was prison what happened what are we doing, Mikko just there one minute because he’s sneaky like that, makes Tyson jump even after so many years, Z with new pictures of his wife and children like he doesn’t post all of them on Instagram all the time, until the room is full, and it’s loud and boisterous and Tyson has to smile. He’s missed this too.

“Tys!” Josty yells, and throws himself at Tyson. “Bro, you’re here!”

“Brilliant deduction,” Tyson retorts, before he’s engulfed by Comphy and Kerfy too. “Woah, gentle with the merchandise, guys.”

“You disappeared,” Josty accuses. Tyson snorts.

“Yeah, you say that, but next time be more careful with the cameras in Santiago, eh?”

It takes them a second, but then Comphy’s eyes widen. “Wait, that was you?”

Tyson shrugs, grinning.

“No it was not!” Kerfy insists. “There’s no way, you were—wherever you’ve been!”

“Want to bet?” Tyson challenges, and the rookies all look at each other, debating. “I can start listing jobs if you want. There was—”

“Stop terrorizing the children.” A hand lands on Tyson’s shoulder, closer to his neck, casually proprietary, and Tyson freezes. Forces himself to relax.

“I’m not terrorizing anyone, Landy,” he retorts calmly, then turns back to the kids. “So, what’s the gossip?” he asks, mainly Josty, because Josty knows basically all the young players in the game, if only because he’s slept with most of them. Tyson’s so proud of his namesake, sometimes.

Josty starts to list everything off, his arms waving energetically, and Tyson moves as subtly as he can—so probably not very subtly—to get away from Gabe’s hand.

Then EJ comes over, and he has to show Tyson pictures of all his horses and also brag about how much he’s won—and lost—at the tracks, and Tyson has to rag on him for being a stereotype of himself and he has to rag on Tyson for existing, and it’s all good fun, and then Tyson drifts over back to Nate to center himself, like always, and Nate grins and throws an arm around his shoulder.

“I missed this,” he says, and Tyson nods, looking out at all the guys chattering excitedly about their lives.

“Yeah, this part I missed too,” he agrees.

///

The pleasantries last a few more hours until they’re all there—minus Willy—and then Gabe stands up.

“Speech!” EJ yells, and that gets cheers and Gabe rolling his eyes at EJ.

“Now that we’re all caught up,” Gabe starts, and he is going to make a speech, of course. Tyson leans back in his chair, slumps down. “Let’s talk about what we’re all here for.”

Years ago, Tyson would have started heckling now, yelled something about how what they’re here for is just to look at Gabe, or something. He keeps his mouth shut. He’s not doing that again.

Gabe’s eyes flick to Tyson, then he goes on. “Four years ago, we got something taken from us,” he says, dark and intent and fiery. “Now we’re going to take it back.”

Four years ago, they all got something taken from them, but Tyson’s not sure how Gabe’s planning to get it back. He’s pretty sure you can’t get back what Tyson did. What Gabe did.

Nate flicks on the projector to the next slide, and Gabe starts outlining the plan, with intercuts from Nate on the actual logistics. Gabe looks good up there, like he always did—their golden captain, irresistible as a flame to a moth, beautiful and restless and dangerous as the sun, dragging them all with him. Or maybe that was just Tyson.

He looks around, as Gabe keeps talking, telling them what he’d told Tyson yesterday on the dock, about diamonds and framing and explosions. It could be four years ago, maybe; the same people, the same intent faces. But things are different too. They’re older—Josty isn’t a kid anymore; the age is starting to show on EJ’s face. And there are other differences too; Tyson’s not entirely sure what happened, but where once Comphy had looked at Josty in a way Tyson recognized all too well, the helpless yearning, now they’re sitting with their knees pressed against each other’s and Josty’s hand resting casually on JT’s thigh, and they’re both stealing glances at each other when they think the other isn’t looking.

Gabe finishes up, and then looks out at all of them. “Any questions?”

Kerfy raises his hand.

“Nerd,” Tyson coughs loudly into his hand, which gets giggles from Z and Sven next to him, a smile from Nate that he’s clearly trying not to show because he has to be dignified or whatever, and another one of those confused looks from Gabe. Kerfy glares, but then, “So—is this like, revenge, or is it for profit?”

Gabe grins, all teeth. “Who says it can’t be both?”

No. Tyson’s not letting him get away with that shit, not again. “So if we have to choose one, which one are we choosing?” he asks loudly, pointedly. “Just in case you change things halfway through.”

Gabe makes a face. “They end up in the same place; you can’t get profit without the revenge, and vice versa.”

“But let’s say you could,” Tyson presses. He can’t help himself anymore. There’s the anger, too late to keep him away. “Let’s say that someone gets caught up in their revenge and tells you to do something that wasn’t originally part of the plan and might mess up the profit part and put people at risk. Are we supposed to do that?”

Gabe must only now realize what he’s talking about, and his lips gape open a little in an O of surprise. “That won’t happen.”

“You say that now.”

Gabe glances around. Nate and EJ are looking between them, worried—they both know what happened. The others probably aren’t as sure; they know about the fire, obviously, but Tyson’s pretty sure they don’t know why it happened—he’d worked pretty hard with Lauren to keep it under wraps.  Tyson definitely never told them. They don’t need to live with this. He can keep some secrets. “Let’s talk about this later, Tyson. In private.”

Like Tyson’s letting himself be in private with Gabe any time soon. “No, I want to know. I think everyone should know. You know, just so that we’re all on the same page.”

“Fine.” Gabe straightens, fixes his eyes right on Tyson. “If it comes down to that—you shouldn’t risk people or profit for revenge.”

Tyson’s breath catches in his throat. He laughs, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Because he can still hear the fucking screams. The room is very quiet, other than his broken laughter, and everyone’s looking at him. His hands are shaking. He can’t—he can’t be here. “Fuck you, Landeskog,” he snaps, and gets to his feet.

“Tys—” Nate starts, making to get up too, but Tyson shakes his head. He can’t see Nate either. He leaves instead, slamming the door behind him.

He doesn’t want to know how Gabe and Nate are going to explain that. Instead, he goes to his room. It’s like every hotel room he’s ever been in. But it has his computers, so he grabs his laptop and goes to the balcony, where he can breathe the freezing crisp fresh air until his fingers stop shaking enough to type.

He misses his house already. He misses his lake. He misses—fuck, he misses being young and innocent and thinking they could do as they please without consequence. He misses when he could just be blindly in love with Gabriel Landeskog and enjoy the ache of it. He misses not dreading going to sleep.

He takes a long, slow breath of the thin Rocky Mountain air. Counts the inhale and the exhale, like the online tutorials said. It makes his hands stop shaking, at least. Makes him feel more solid. Makes his fingers stop shaking enough to type, at least.

There’s a knock on his door, some time later. “It’s me,” Nate announces, and at least that’s something. Tyson was afraid Gabe would come confront him himself. If he had—if he had, Tyson would probably be on the next plane north. Or someone would end up falling off a balcony.

Tyson sighs, and gets up to let him in, then goes back to the balcony. Nate follows him out, then sits down on the chair across from Tyson’s, and gives Tyson his mother hen look, so out of place in so young a face. He doesn’t even call Tyson on sitting on a balcony in winter in the Rockies, so Tyson knows it’s bad.

“I know that was out of line,” Tyson starts. “I won’t do it again.”

“Yeah, but he deserved it,” Nate says, and Tyson finds himself smiling. He loves Nate so much, so he tells him that. Nate smiles too, a little.

“Are you going to be able to handle this?” he asks. “If you can’t, you can go home and I’ll deal with Landy. I didn’t want you to—”

“I’ll be fine,” Tyson tells him. Tells himself. He can do this. He has to be able to do this. “Seriously. If I’m actually starting to mess up, you can like, drug me to get enough sleep.”

Instead of making Nate feel better, like he expected, it makes Nate look even more worried. “It’s gotten that bad?”

“It comes and goes.” Tyson looks out at the mountains. Keeps typing, because it’s easier to do that too. “More coming than going, last few nights.”

“Because of Landy?”

“Because of—being back,” Tyson says. “Which is Landy, but also—” he shakes his head, and Nate makes an understanding sound. Tyson looks up at Nate, serious as he knows how. “I made him promise not to lie to me. Which means that if he is, and you know—”

“I’ll tell you,” Nate promises, and the thing about Nate is that Tyson believes him. Nate’s Gabe’s point man, his partner, but he’s Tyson’s best friend. “I don’t think he will, though. He’s changed too.”

“Yeah? He got even more muscles, just to mess with my sanity?”

Nate chuckles. “No. I don’t know, maybe I’m just projecting.”

“He’s still a dick.”

“He’s always been a dick,” Nate points out, which is true. Tyson just never used to mind. Or it never hit Tyson quite so personally.

Nate’s still watching Tyson, looking so concerned, like Tyson’s going to explode like some of EJ’s explosives. He might, to be honest; he feels like he’s on a hair trigger again, like the first few months after Stockholm. But he can handle himself. Nate has to worry about a lot more.

“Are you okay?” Tyson asks, because people forget to ask Nate that, a lot. “You’ve been in charge recently on your jobs.” Nate’s grown into his own too in the last four years, and Tyson’s not going to let Gabe forget that either.

“What? Yeah, it’s fine.” Nate shrugs. “It’ll be good for me, honestly. Sid talks a lot about how balancing leadership and the ability to take instruction is important, and—”

“Like Sidney Crosby’s been subordinate to anyone since he was nineteen.” 

“He has!” Nate insists. “In Tampa, this past year, he—” Once Nate starts talking about his mentor, he can go on for ages, so Tyson cuts him off again.

“Do you think this is going to work?” he asks. That’s what he needs to know, he thinks. That’ll make it worth it. Nate nods.

“You know,” he says, considering. “I think it just might.”

///

Gabe doesn’t say anything to him, when they all reconvene for dinner. Tyson thinks they might have talked about it, because the rookies swarm him and don’t let him go, which is a fun and easy distraction that Tyson will take, and Gabe and Nate and EJ talk about important leadership things as Tyson gets into a darts competition with the kids. It’d be easier, if he couldn’t feel Gabe watching him, the whole time.

Slowly, everyone drifts off to bed—it doesn’t escape Tyson’s notice that Josty and Comphy leave at the same time, even though he thinks they’re trying to be subtle about it—but Tyson knows what’ll happen if he falls asleep, so he stays. Well, he half-drifts off on the couch, listening to Nate and EJ and Willy and Kerfy talk about mutual acquaintances, but he’s mostly listening and leaning into Nate, who’s comfortably warm and has always had the best shoulder to sleep on, other than Gabe, who isn’t an option right now. But it’s not really sleeping, so it’s safe, and for the first time in years Tyson’s surrounded by his crew.

Then—“Tyson,” Someone’s murmuring, and shaking his shoulder. Tyson mumbles and turns into Nate more. God, he’s tired.

“Let him sleep,” Nate argues. “He doesn’t get enough, come on—”

“I need to talk to him,” Gabe tells him. Then, “What do you mean, he doesn’t get enough?”

Nate snorts. “Pay attention for a few days and you’ll see.”

“I do—”

“Stop talking about me,” Tyson mutters, trying to wake up.

“No, go back to sleep.”

“No, wake up, we need to talk.”

Tyson blinks again. Two faces framed in blonde hair come into focus, and for a second he smiles, because these are the two people other than his family he loves most in the world.

Then—right. He swallows, forces himself back. “No.”

“No to what?” Gabe asks. The room’s empty other than the three of them; Tyson must have actually gotten something close to sleep, which he wasn’t expecting. 

“I’m not talking to you.”

“You’re talking to everyone else.”

“Yeah, I’m not talking to _you_.”

“Which is why we need to talk,” Gabe insists, and his hand is still heavy on Tyson’s arm, like he has a right to touch like that.

“No, we don’t.”

“Why not?” Gabe asks, and Tyson groans and straightens, shaking off Gabe’s hand. He can wake up.

“Because I can’t handle it!” Tyson’s voice is loud in the quiet room. Next to him, Nate’s gone tense. Because if they talked, he’d to think about it and he can’t. Because if he talks, everything’s going to break. “Because I thought you wanted me to do this job, and I can’t talk to you if you want that.”

Gabe blinks. He wasn’t expecting all that, apparently. “Why can’t you talk to me?” he asks, more quietly. Almost plaintive.

“Because—I can’t forgive you,” Tyson tells him, and there it goes again, the anger drained into his bone deep exhaustion. “I don’t know how.”  

Gabe looks horrified, or maybe hurt. “Why me? I didn’t know what would happen.”

Neither of them did. They both should have. Tyson sighs. “Look, I’ll do this job. You got me. I’ll do this, but I can’t—” He takes a breath, and Nate’s steady, encouraging next to him. “It can’t be what it was, Gabe. I can’t do that with you again.”

“We can’t be friends?” Gabe asks. He looks like it hurt him. A part of Tyson is viciously glad about that. “Tys, I went to—”

“I don’t know.” Tyson’s so tired. “I don’t know, and I’m going to bed.”

“You’ll be okay?” Nate asks, catching his wrist as he gets up.

Tyson probably won’t be. But—“Yeah,” he says, because he wants Nate to hear it, to believe he’s still functional, so he won’t be so worried he sends Gabe up to get him to do a job. And because he wants Gabe to hear it, wants Gabe to know that he’s not the pathetic guy he was five years ago, panting after Gabe and willing to do whatever he said.

Nate doesn’t look like he really believes him, but he lets him go. Gabe’s still watching him, and he’s still too pretty and too intent and his gaze sets something off in Tyson, but he’s not going to give in to that, so he goes back to his room.

He falls asleep within minutes.

He wakes up again within hours, his sheets wet with sweat and his whole body shaking, trying not to remember what it felt like to hear those screams, to see the flames, to learn what it meant to have consequences for your actions. For your failures.

He doesn’t get back to sleep. Instead, he picks up his computer, goes out to the balcony, and gets to work.

///

As always with a job, prep stretches on—most of the work is in the prep, Sakic used to say. For some of the guys, that means maintaining identities, getting jobs, doing recon up at the resort—Comphy gets inserted as a ski instructor because apparently he can actually ski, which makes Josty sulky, though Tyson’s not entirely sure if that’s because he wanted to go flirt with bored tourists or if he’s jealous that Comphy’s flirting with bored tourists—but for Tyson, it mainly means just staying in the hotel. He goes to the resort once or twice, keeping his head down, to get to their wires, but Gabe and Nate have generally agreed that they don’t want anyone who Roy might recognize around the resort if they can help it.

That means that Tyson sits a lot in Nate’s suite, working on his computer, as the other guys cycle in and out on their various tasks and stop to chat with him. It reminds Tyson of the best parts of a job, of his boys all together, of the thrill of it coming together. It’s enough to almost make him sure he did the right thing, coming back—taking a break debating wireless detonators with EJ, cooing appropriately over Z’s kids even though Tyson knows like, less than nothing about kids, taking naps on Nate’s bed because he sleeps better there, bantering with the rookies when they come through and need attention.

The down side, of course, is that he’s not the only one who’s quarantined from the resort. EJ spends most of his time down in the warehouse they rented playing with his bombs, but Nate and Gabe can only do so many errands, and so they spend a lot of their time in the suite too, pacing and fussing and arguing and generally making nuisances of themselves when someone—namely, Tyson—is trying to work.

It only gets worse when the other guys are around, too. Tyson sort of misses the jobs when Lauren’s actually in the room with them, instead of just consulting; the guys tend to behave a little more with her around—either because of some semblance of chivalry, or because she’s scary. But now, Josty and Kerfy are in the suite, and Josty is loudly complaining about why Comphy got the fun ski instructor job while he had to run around and pretend to do various service industry jobs.

“It’s because we didn’t want your face to scare everyone away,” Tyson finally inserts, as Josty pauses for breath.  “It’d be too conspicuous.”

Josty scoffs. “Right. More like you didn’t want everyone to notice that one instructor was getting too popular.”

“Popular because they’d love to watch you wipe out, maybe,” Kerfy inputs, and Josty hits him with a pillow. Tyson snorts.

“We give everyone the jobs they’re best suited to,” Nate says, his lips twitching in a way that Tyson knows means he’s feeling good about his next chirp. “That’s why Comphy gets to be nice to kids and you get to clean up hot chocolate.”

Josty makes a face, and Tyson grins, claps him on the back. “Don’t feel bad, mini-me. Nate and Gabe just know they’d need you distracting people.”

“Are you calling me slutty?” Josty demands.

“Yeah, Tyson. Are you calling someone else slutty?” Nate puts in, and Tyson takes the pillow from Josty to throw at Nate, who catches it, laughing. He can feel Gabe’s gaze on him, from where he’s talking quietly on the phone near the door to Nate’s bedroom. That feeling’s been happening a lot, lately. Tyson’s been trying to ignore it.

“I speak from experience,” Tyson informs Nate, trying for lofty, but a little distracted because the code’s a little more complicated than he expected and it takes more attention than he’d been paying it. He finishes what he was doing, sets it to compiling. “I know why you guys always kept me in reserve.”

Josty snorts. “You wish you’d ever been as good as me.”

“Don’t under estimate T-Bear,” Nate says, and Tyson looks up to grin at him. “In his day, he got around.”

“Thanks, Dawg,” Tyson tells him, half drawling. It’s not like he’s wrong.

“Really?” Kerfy asks, and his gaze flicks over to the door. “Even though—”

“Wow, I am not feeling the love right now,” Tyson announces, cutting Kerfy off before he can say something super embarrassing. Anyway, it’s not like Tyson had stopped hooking up, after he met and fell into the Gabriel Landeskog black hole. Unrequited, hopeless love wasn’t mutually exclusive with fun anywhere else. It had just meant that he had always, inevitably, circled back, summoned from whoever he’d been spending time with when Gabe tugged his strings. “Do you need a demonstration?”

“Maybe I do,” Kerfy retorts, straightening. A sort of strangled noise comes from the door, as Tyson turns to Kerfy, leans in and licks his lips, giving his best con’s smile.

He opens his mouth, then—

“No, this is weird, you’re like my kid brother,” he decides. “It’d be like seducing Nate, I don’t want to.”

“Thanks, bro.”

“Anytime.” Tyson nods at Nate, and then his computer tells him the code’s done and he looks back at his computer. Damn, this is going to be trickier than he thought. “Okay, now I actually have to do work—”

“You?”

“Shut up, Kerf, like you could do what I do,” Tyson informs him. He can still feel Gabe just looking at him, and it’s—distracting, to say the least. “I’m concentrating.”

“But—”

“Okay, everyone who isn’t doing work, go take a lap,” Gabe announces, which gets groaning from Josty and Kerfy and Willy, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner, but they all get up, still grumbling. Tyson keeps his eyes on his screen. Gabe’s a good leader, when he wants to be. That’s nothing new.

He feels warmth, near his back. “What do you have?” Gabe asks, leaning close. Tyson takes a long breath. Doesn’t think about how good he smells.

“Getting there. Security’s good, no surprise, but I know how they work—there’ll be backdoors.”

“It’s good, but you’re better?” Gabe sums up, and Tyson can hear the laugh in his voice, and knows if he looked over Gabe would be smiling at him, pulling him back in.

“Something like that,” Tyson says as evenly as he can. “I’m working on it now,” he adds, in what he hopes is a pointed sort of voice but is probably more broken and just a plea for Gabe not to push because he’s still not confident he’ll hold out if he does.

Some of that must get across, because Gabe steps back, and leaves Tyson to it.

It’s quieter, with the kids gone. Nate and EJ and Gabe are talking about something for a while, but Tyson’s used to them as background sound. He thinks they might leave at some point, or some of them do; he doesn’t really pay attention, lets the code take his attention. He’s good at this. It’s always comforting, having it to come back to. He’s a mess of a human being, on more metrics than he cares to count, but binary will always make sense. 

The adrenaline’s starting to fade and thus so is he by the time the sun starts to hit the mountain peaks. He leans back, twists to crack his back, and—

There’s a coffee, sitting next to him, from the hipster place downstairs that he’d noticed but dismissed because despite their good reviews they look like the sort of place that would laugh at him for making it sweet.

Tyson looks around. Nate and Gabe and EJ are still there, and Kerfy and Willy are idly watching ESPN on the TV. No one else has coffee.

Whatever, Tyson’s tired, like he always is, and the worst that’ll happen is it’ll taste like salt because someone’s playing a prank—he preemptively suspects EJ.

Instead, it tastes—perfect, honestly, sugary sweet like he knows everyone else hates just tinged with espresso, exactly like he likes it. He sighs, enjoying it, and looks at Nate to thank him.

Nate shakes his head, and glances over to where Gabe’s watching Tyson drink the coffee, smiling with something that looks like relief.

Tyson pauses. Gabe got him this? It doesn’t make sense—it’s not that Gabe isn’t a nice guy, or he doesn’t do things for his team, or even that he doesn’t do things generally for friends if they’re having shitty days, but he’s never gone out of his way to get Tyson coffee just how he likes it before. Tyson’s not sure he’s done that for anyone that he knows of, and Tyson generally knows a lot about his crew given that he’s the one doing their cybersecurity.

He doesn’t know what this means. But he’s tired, and the coffee’s good, and he’s not going to like, throw it in Gabe’s face or something. So he drinks it, and doesn’t look at Gabe’s smile when he does.

///

Tyson decides not to think about it—except it keeps happening. Coffee shows up at his elbow. Cake on his desk. Once he wakes up from a nap and a blanket’s been thrown over him. Gabe throws people out of the room when he needs quiet, and definitely sometimes puts off a meeting when Tyson’s been asleep so no one wakes him up—as Z whined about, because apparently that’s special treatment. Gabe had shrugged, and hadn’t denied it, and started the progress meeting. Tyson had just sort of stared.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what it means, that Gabe’s being weirdly nice. Is it an apology? Because it’s not a good one if it is; nothing Gabe does can really make up for what happened. Is it some sort of long term prank? If so, it’s not a good one Tyson can see, unless the punchline is Tyson being an idiot again.

And if he says something—Tyson knows himself, and if he says something, everything else is going to come pouring out, and he can’t do that. Not and stay.

So he lets it happen. The coffee’s good, anyway; he’d forgotten what it was like, to have to be on a schedule with people who sleep at normal times. And he’s not going to say no to better working conditions, even if he still works best with people around him, generally.

Which means he’s in Nate’s suite when Comphy comes in, his cheeks almost as red as his hair from the sunburn, but looking nervous.

“We’ve got a problem,” he announces, and Nate and Gabe look up from where they’ve been talking in the corner. Because he announced it loudly, everyone else in the room looks up too—EJ had come to snack and bother Tyson; Willy and Mikko were playing cards on a table, Josty had followed Comphy in because Tyson suspected he did that a lot, these days—he’s really not sure what’s going on there, but he thinks it’s #complicated. All of them turn to look at Comphy.

Tyson does too, even though he keeps typing.

“What?” Gabe demands.

Comphy swallows, but he starts talking. It boils down to something simple—Roy left.

“Left?” Gabe repeats. He’s crackling, like he does angry, his shoulders puffed out and his face like a storm.

“Yeah. There was a problem at one of his places down south, and he took off.”

“His schedule said he was staying here,” Nate says, then looks at Tyson, who nods. It did.

“Well, then it’s not accurate, because his secretary said he was gone for the month,” Comphy retorts.

“And she wasn’t just protecting him?” Gabe asks, harsh.

“No, she was pretty adamant.”

“You’re sure?”

“He said he was sure,” Josty puts in, bristling. Gabe whirls on him, and Josty winces back—Gabe in a temper always feels dangerous.

“Forgive me for checking because this fucks up all our plans!” Gabe snaps. He takes a step forward, and he’s looming—he’s not much taller than Josty but in a temper Gabe takes up all the space in the room. “What the—”

“Gabe,” Nate says, low and calm and steady, and Gabe freezes. Takes a breath, and looks around—at Josty staring at him, at Comphy with his hand on Josty’s shoulder and glaring at Gabe, at everyone else’s looks ranging from confusion to worry to interest—and then his gaze lands on Tyson. Tyson doesn’t even know what’s showing on his face. This is Gabe, and he’s not surprised—the temper, the rashness when it’s there. Him knowing Gabe has never been the issue, except for how he sometimes forgot what that means. What Gabe will do, when that rashness hits. But he doesn’t anymore.

“Fuck,” Gabe mutters, and stalks out the door, slams it behind him.

Comphy jerks as the sound of the slamming door rings out—Mikko drops his cards. “I didn’t…” Comphy starts, trails off. He wrinkles his nose. “It’s not that big a deal, I thought? It’ll still work without Roy here, as long as he gets the diamonds?”

Nate’s looking at the door, but Tyson stands up. “I’ll go,” he tells Nate. Someone needs to talk Gabe down before he does something stupid. No one knows that better than Tyson.

Nate looks relieved, but he still pauses. “You sure?”

Tyson’s not. But Nate and EJ need to stay here and deal with the mess Gabe left behind, and Tyson still wants this to work. “Yeah,” he says, and slips out of the room.

He heads downstairs, and catches Gabe out in the resort lawns, pacing.  It’s a beautiful place—Tyson loves his lakes and oceans, the Pacific coast island of his childhood, but there’s something beautiful about these mountain resorts too, the starkness of them, all the green covered in snow. And Gabe fits here too, somehow, though Tyson thinks he could probably fit in anywhere, the energy taut in his tense muscle, like some caged lion, caught but not cowed. Tyson’s breath catches, for a moment. There might be a world in which Tyson doesn’t think Gabe is the most gorgeous person in existence, but Tyson hasn’t found it yet.

“Are you done having your tantrum yet?” Tyson asks. Gabe’s head jerks to look at him, and for a second there’s something angry and raw and wanting in that look, like Gabe’s been stripped open and there’s some hole that’s gaping in him—then that look slams down over his con’s neutrality, a smile on his face that makes something in Tyson hurt.

“I don’t have tantrums,” Gabe says. Tyson rolls his eyes, and perches on the arm of one of the benches to watch. His fingers are drumming against his thigh.

“Then what was that in there? Yelling at the kids?”

“They aren’t kids.”

“They’re still young,” Tyson corrects, because they are—still young and feeling immortal and untouchable. “And it’s not their fault.”

“They’re the ones with the most contact. If they spooked—”

“Or if I got the schedule wrong, or if EJ sourced things from Roy’s contacts, or if Lauren left a trail,” Tyson interrupts again. “We don’t know. It could be anything. He could have gotten word you were out or saw you around and made himself scarce.”

“How? I’ve been shut in that damn room.” Gabe turns to pace again, his legs eating up the distance. “How could I have done it?”

“You’re the one who gives the orders,” Tyson says flatly. Gabe doesn’t need to be in a room to do something, and they both know it. Gabe stills, turns.

“Tys—”

“And we don’t know why he rabbitted,” Tyson hurries on, before Gabe says something, before that rawness comes back out. “He’s just as likely to fuck off just because he feels like it or someone looked at him wrong, anyway. And you know that. Like you know that this doesn’t really change anything.”

“Yes it does,” Gabe insists, and he’s giving Tyson the big eyes he gives when he wants someone to agree with him. It twists in Tyson, of course, but—but he’s not. Not this time. “He needs to be found with the—”

“Someone else can do that, and Nate and EJ are figuring that out right now,” Tyson points out, which Gabe also knows, and he knows Gabe knows that because he’s got his con’s face on again, which he wouldn’t do if he knew he was in the right. “Why does Roy need to be there?”

“It’s part of the plan,” Gabe repeats, and Tyson sighs.

“You said you wouldn’t lie to me,” he warns. How stupid does Gabe think he is? Or no, that’s not right—Gabe doesn’t think he’s stupid, he just probably never expected him to push back. Even when it’s clear Gabe’s lying. “Should I leave?”

“I’m not—”

“Gabe,” Tyson repeats, another warning, and Gabe breathes in fast and stalks forward, until he’s closer, and no one will overhear them.

“He has to be here so he knows,” Gabe growls. “He has to know it was us, that we’re getting him back.”

Tyson can barely breathe. He knew, but still—“I thought this wasn’t just revenge,” he points out, because it has to be. It has to be more.

“It is,” Gabe repeats, and he might be lying but Tyson can’t tell, because it’s just—fuck, it’s just Gabe, taking up the entirety of his vision. “Of course it is. But—he has to know.”

“Why?”

“How can _you_ ask that?” Gabe demands, and he’s vibrating again, like it’s taking everything in him not to move. “If not for what he did to me, for what he did to you?”

Tyson swallows. His fingers curl into his thighs. He needs to be okay, right now. He can be okay. He can’t have an anxiety attack now. “What he did to me?” Tyson echoes.

Gabe rolls his eyes, but he steps closer. “Do you think I didn’t notice? You don’t sleep. You’re always on edge. You don’t smile. You won’t talk to me—”

“I’m talking to you now,” Tyson gets out, because the rest of it—he can’t think about Gabe thinking about the rest of it. He’d known he did, noticed the coffee and everything, but this was different. “I do smile.”

“Not at me,” Gabe tells him, and there it is again, the con’s smile slipped, into something lost and confused. “Not anymore.”

Tyson manages almost to laugh. “And whose fault is that?” he asks, and he tries to breath but Gabe’s so close and he can almost hear the screams and he wants his home and his lake and not to be here, not to have to face this.

“That’s why he needs to be here, so he can feel it,” Gabe snaps. Tyson does laugh this time, a broken, mirthless sound. “He needs to feel it, to pay for what he did to us—”

“He wasn’t who I was talking about,” Tyson retorts, and Gabe’s eyes widen. Like he didn’t think about it.  Like he hadn’t thought about it every day for the past four years. Maybe he didn’t. He hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t pushed the button.

“Who, then—”

“Me!” Tyson bursts out, and flinches when Gabe moves at that. “I pushed the buttons, I started the fire. I killed Richard Jenkins, Gabe,” he says, and he’s not sure he’s ever said the words before but they hurt as they come out. “That’s his name, if you didn’t know it. I overloaded the wiring and—”

“You didn’t know—”

“I knew it could, I _told_ you it could.” It’s all pouring out of him now, the things he hasn’t even said to Nate. The things that tear him apart. If anyone should take it, should hear it, it’s Gabe. He should be living this too. “I said it might be too much for the wiring, and it was—”

“Because Roy didn’t build up to code, you couldn’t have known that. It would have been fine if he’d built right.” Gabe’s eyes are wide now as they look at Tyson, and he lifts up his hand like he’s going to touch Tyson. Tyson jerks back. If Gabe touches him right now he doesn’t know what he’ll do, but it will definitely draw attention. Gabe’s hand stills, but his expression is hurt again. “He—”

“It’s my job to know,” Tyson corrects him, because he’s gone over it a hundred times and that’s what he’s come down to. Every time. He should have looked harder. Done more. “I should have known. I was supposed to know. I—”

“Couldn’t have,” Gabe interrupts. “It wasn’t on you. You blamed yourself, all this time? Is that why—”

“I blamed us,” Tyson corrects, and straightens. He wishes he could be angry still. Wishes he wasn’t sucked dry. Wishes he wasn’t here, they hadn’t talked. “You too.”

“Me?” Gabe asks, and he sounds angry. “I didn’t do anything.”

Tyson chuckles dryly again. “You told me to do it. It wasn’t part of the plan, we weren’t supposed to, and then you got pissed at Dutchy leaving and—”

“I didn’t know this would happen!” Gabe’s face is turning red. “If I had, I wouldn’t have—”

“Maybe you didn’t know, but you knew it was a bad idea,” Tyson cuts off, and he knows this too, like he knows his name, like he knows Gabe’s face. “Or you wouldn’t have asked me.”

“It was your job—”

“And you didn’t tell Nate, and you didn’t tell EJ, you just told me.” Tyson tips his head back. He can’t look at Gabe. The stars are very bright, like they are back at his lake. “Who you knew would do what you wanted. Who you knew you could smile at and tell me that it was something you needed me to do, and I’d do it.”

“I didn’t kill him. We didn’t—”

“We had the building bugged,” Tyson goes on. This is what disassociation feels like, he thinks. He’s read about this, when he was trying to self-diagnose himself. It all feels very flat. “That meant the sound was still on. People don’t burn quietly, did you know that? Not when it goes up that hot and fast. I heard plenty before the bugs burned, or the firefighters got there. Most of the bugs burned first.”

“Tyson,” Gabe says, and he sounds gutted. Tyson looks at him. He’s never seen Gabe look like this before. He looks like someone cut him open. “Tyson, we didn’t—we didn’t know, if I’d known I never would have, I wouldn’t have asked you to—”

“You did, though.” Tyson swallows. Closes his eyes for a second. Fuck, he wants to sleep. He never wants to sleep, not when he’s thinking about it, thinking about the screams and watching the building go up and staring at his hands and those few innocent looking lines of code that had overloaded the wiring. “You asked and of course I did it. Even though I knew it was a bad idea.”

“It’s not—you didn’t kill that man,” Gabe says, and he’s still pale as the moon above them but he’s leaning in, towards Tyson. He reaches out another hand. “Is this why you won’t—”

“Don’t touch me,” Tyson snaps, and jerks away again. Gabe freezes, then slowly, he leans back, out of Tyson’s space.

“Is this why you’re so mad?” Gabe asks.

Tyson shakes his head. “I’m not mad,” he says, and it’s true. “I was, but—” he shrugs. “We both know I’m bad at being angry at you.”

“What do you—”

“Don’t,” Tyson says, because they both know what he means and he doesn’t want to hear Gabe lie to him again. “But Gabe, you can’t do that again. Not to them.” He nods up at the room. “You’ve got to be careful.” Gabe’s not good at that, never was, but Tyson can try. Has to try.

Gabe’s staring at Tyson, and he’s still got that look on, like he’s never seen Tyson before. Tyson shrugs. Swallows. Eases himself out, around Gabe. “So, that’s my thing. Now that you’ve heard all about my nightmares, you can stop being an idiot,” he says, turning to go up the walk and into the suite and maybe bury himself in Nate’s side and work and never come back until he stops thinking about it, “and actually be productive, and—”

“Tyson,” Gabe interrupts and Tyson stops. Looks at him. He’s got his hand raised again like he’d just thought better of touching Tyson, and he’s at his most earnest, all wide blue eyes and a lock of hair falling into his eyes. “I’m trying. I will. I am.” He meets Tyson’s eyes squarely. “With the job and with you.”

Tyson runs a hand back through his hair. “Okay,” he says. Gabe’s a con, though. He knows what Tyson wants to hear.

//

“Little to the left,” Tyson says. Kerfy sighs, and on the screen Tyson can see him move to the left. “No, wait. To the right more.”

“You’re just doing this to mess with me,” Kerfy mutters out of the side of his mouth, as he moves to the right. Tyson can still see all of him, including the crucial plant he’s carrying.

“I swear I’m not,” Tyson assures him, not really trying hard not to laugh. He’s in a good mood tonight, despite his conversation with Gabe a few days ago; he’d slept through the night for one night and most of another, for the first time since he got here. Maybe there was something to the idea that talking things out helped. “But also, Simon says put the plant on your head.”

“No,” Kerfy replies. “Can you see me now?”

“He did say Simon says,” Gabe says, and Tyson tries not to sound like he’s breathing too hard as Gabe appears on his screen next to Kerfy—the one good thing about Roy being out of town, other than the frankly hilarious updates that they’ve been getting from Z and Barbs down in Reno as they drive Roy back here, is that they’ve all got a bit more freedom to move, which Gabe is taking full advantage of. It’s good for Tyson, too—for his heart in every sense of the word. Gabe’s been looking at him weirdly since that conversation, and not in the times when he knows Tyson’s watching him. In the corners of moments. It feels like a weight on Tyson’s shoulders, or maybe it feels like weightlessness.

“He’s being a dick.”

“Are you surprised?” Gabe asks, and Kerfy snorts.

“I’m not putting a plant on my head.”

“Maybe I want to see if it’s visible that high,” Tyson points out, and Kerfy glares at the camera. “Watch it. People are looking.”

They are, though it’s always hard to tell if that’s because Kerfy and Gabe are apparently having a conversation with the air, or because they’re two good-looking guys. Gabe turns, angles himself; he smiles at the woman at the desk who’s been giving them an odd look. It’s like magic, as always, how she smiles back.

“Do I really have to put the plant above my head?” Kerfy asks, sounding plaintive and suspicious but not entirely against the idea, so,

“Yes,” Tyson and Gabe say, together.

Tyson blinks at the screen. Gabe’s head jerks, up to the camera, so it looks like he’s just staring at Tyson, and his eyes are wide and his lips are starting to pull into a smile, the special sort of smile he’d always used on Tyson, or so he’d thought—that that specific mixture of amusement, conspiracy, and camaraderie was just his. It’s not how he’d smiled at the woman at the desk.

Tyson shakes his head to clear it. He can’t do this. “I mean, no. Just,” he switches cameras, swings around, “try taking a step forward and two steps to your right.”

Kerfy sighs, and does it, as Gabe turns with him so it looks like they’re talking to each other. Tyson watches as his hand switches from one camera, to the next, then—“There. Right there.”

“Yeah?” Kerfy might be doing something, but Tyson can’t see him. “What about now?”

“Still nothing.”

“And—” he must be making wider motions, because then his hand comes on the corner of a screen.

“No, I got you there.”

“That’s enough range of motion,” Gabe decides, looking at Kerfy, who nods. “We good here, Tys?”

“Unless you need me for anything else,” Tyson replies, and Kerfy makes a face like he’s holding back a dirty joke. Tyson’s just glad he didn’t actually make it.

“No, that’s it,” Gabe says, and looks at the camera again.

Tyson nods. “Then I’ll sign off. Don’t get yourself caught.”

Gabe’s forehead wrinkles for a second. Tyson hadn’t used to sign off, probably—he’d have stayed in Gabe’s ear, because he liked those time they had, when nothing was happening and it was just the two of them shooting the shit, when Gabe had nothing else to do but pay attention to Tyson. Gabe must have noticed, then. 

Then Gabe’s forehead smoothes out, and something like his weird look comes over his face. “Get some sleep,” he says, gentle, and Tyson bites at his lip, and closes his computer. Gabe’s gentleness might be the hardest thing to resist. He’d never been gentle with Tyson before. Why would he have bothered?

He leans back in the desk chair. He’s in his room, not Nate’s; Nate had been videoconferencing with Z and Barbs and had kicked Tyson out. It means the room is empty, and quiet. He can hear his own breaths. If he looks out the window, he can see the mountains, but other than that, for a second, he could almost be back at his lake, where everything was simple again. Where Gabe was far away, and he could not think about everything that came before. Where he could put everything behind him.

He drums his fingers on the desk, then opens his computer again. There’s not much he can do right now for the job, but he has some projects of his own to work on. Or that he can work on, which is maybe the same thing.

“—about them,” comes Kerfy’s voice, and Tyson nearly jumps. He must not have actually signed off, and Kerfy and Gabe must not have taken out their earpieces. They aren’t on camera anymore—they must have headed back to the hotel—but the sound quality is still clear.

Tyson hits mute on his own mic. He’s never claimed to be a good person.

“What’s wrong?” Gabe asks, in his team leader voice. “Are they okay?”

“Yeah, I mean, right now,” Kerfy tells him. “But they’re such idiots.”

Tyson can hear the smile in Gabe’s voice as he replies. “Oh, _they_ ’re idiots?”  

“Shut up,” Kerfy mutters. “But, I mean—they’re so…they just do things, sometimes. And I don’t—I can’t—stop them. Even if they’re going to get hurt.” He pauses, then adds. “You know. Like with Roy—him leaving.”

“We don’t know why that happened,” Gabe says, evenly.

“Yeah, but even you thought it could have been Comphy. Or we both know Josty’s spending most of his time trailing after him all day, which is so fucking stupid, and it’s mainly just because he refuses to just tell JT that it’s serious for him, and then Comphy’s probably trying to show off for him because he knows Josty’s there too, and—” Kerfy takes a breath. “They’re playing games with the stuff in the safe. It’s not big, but it could get them—”

“They’ll be okay,” Gabe interrupts, as Tyson immediately starts flipping to the logs of the cameras around the safe and pulling up the trackers on Comphy and Josty’s phones. The idiots. Honestly, everyone knows you don’t pull side jobs during a job, even little things. Even to impress a boy. Even if Tyson’s ignoring all the little things he used to do, the easter eggs he’d leave for Gabe.  “They are young. All you guys are.”

“I’m older than you were when you went to prison,” Kerfy points out, and Tyson can hear the minute shift in Gabe’s posture, or something, as he reacts to that.

“It’s not an age thing,” Gabe says, slowly. “It’s a—the things you’ve done, thing.”

Kerfy snorts. “I’ve been pulling jobs since I was a kid.”

“Sure, Harvard boy.” But then Gabe goes serious. Tyson wishes he could see his face. “It’s not just the jobs. It’s who the jobs have hurt.” Tyson’s fingers slow on the keyboard.

“Rich people can lose a little money,” Kerfy says, dismissive in the way that’s bred into all their bones.

“There can be collateral damage.” Gabe sounds….not thoughtful. Regretful. Pained. “You guys’ll learn that. I did.” He makes a low noise Tyson can’t quite interpret. “We did.”

“Is this why you and Tyson and Nate are being so weird?” Kerfy asks.

“Weird?” That tone is gone, replaced by something pointedly casual. “I mean, they’re always weird, but I am always normal.”

Kerfy laughs. “Yeah, sure, bro. You’re totally normal.”

“I am!” Gabe protests, and Tyson starts typing again, tracking Comphy and Josty down. Kerfy’s right, to no one’s surprise. They’ve definitely been playing some form of flirting chicken with the safe. Tyson approves in theory, but like, be better about it, guys. And don’t do it on the job. He shoots off a message to Lauren, to see if there’s any buzz about things missing from the safe; better for her to see what she can do about stopping it now, before it gets bigger.

Kerfy and Gabe jostle about who’s normal for a while, which, Tyson notices, neatly distracts Kerfy from the question about the tensions that are simmering between them. Then they’re quiet for a while, as Tyson goes about hiding Comphy and Josty’s tracks. It’s harder than he expected—the safe’s no joke, a state of the art machine in a room that’s wired to hell and back, enough that Tyson sort of expects a laser grid because it seems on brand. Getting in even enough to wipe the cameras isn’t going to be easy.

Then,

“They’re just young and reckless. They’ll learn,” Gabe says, earnest and comforting, their fearless leader, always. “And until they do, we’ll look out for them.”

“I try, but—”

“We all will,” Gabe tells him, and Tyson doesn’t have to see him to know that he has a hand on Kerfy’s shoulder, that he’s staring him down with all the willpower that’s in him, that firm belief and sparking humor that had sucked Tyson in before he had a chance to stop it. “We take care of our own.”

Tyson’s eyes fall shut. He can hear Kerfy swallow. Hear him say, quiet, half-embarrassed, “Thank you.” Hear Gabe’s laugh, and his change of subject, and hear the doors to the hotel open.

This would be easier, he thinks, if Gabe wasn’t Gabe. If he weren’t still all the things that had made Tyson fall so desperately in love with him. Or if that could cancel out all the things Tyson can’t forgive him for.

 _There can be collateral damage_ , he’d said, and oh, Tyson knows that, knows it too well, the thing none of them had known four years ago. He wonders what it means, that Gabe’s saying it like it’s a lesson he’s learned.

There’s a knock on the door, light, not shy but maybe diffident.

“Yeah?” Tyson calls.

“It’s me,” Gabe replies, and Tyson gets up to open the door. Gabe’s standing in the doorway, taking up most of the doorway but not coming in. He takes up so much space, always.

“What’s up?” Tyson is probably red, but hopefully Gabe will not put that down to him having eavesdropped.

“It’s the rookies,” Gabe says. He glances down the hall. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.” Tyson steps aside, and Gabe closes the door behind him. Now Gabe is in his room. Standing next to his bed.  Looking at him in that weird way—in a way that isn’t his con’s smoothness.

Tyson’s phone buzzes, and he looks at it— _nothing’s come up on my alerts and not on a quick check_ , Lauren’s replied. _Want me to go deeper?_

 _Nah, if no one’s noticed I’ll cut it off here_ , Tyson types back. Gabe’s watching him, looking almost patient.

 _Were you doing something stupid again?_ , she’s asked, and Tyson chuckles.

 _Swear it wasn’t me this time_. He looks up, and Gabe raises his eyebrows, then,

“Apparently Josty and Comphy are being stupid,” Gabe starts, and Tyson snorts. Right. He’s not supposed to have heard this.

“Big surprise.”

“Right?” Gabe smiles, laughs, and Tyson strictly tells his stomach that he shouldn’t be having butterflies, that he’s made Gabe laugh. He’s not over it, but he can control it. “But it’s the sort of stupid that might be dangerous, so—”

“I’ll clean up after them,” Tyson replies, like he hasn’t started already. “I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

“Thanks.” Gabe pauses, then adds, raising his eyebrows like Tyson wasn’t doing what he expected.  He fills in, “They’ve been stealing from the resort safe. It’s not quite clear why it’s a game, but—”

“Right, I got it,” Tyson agrees. “I can clear it up if they were stupid and caught on camera, or messed up. Not that I think they did, necessarily, because they’re good, but in case they did, say, miss a camera in their recon because they clearly didn’t do it well enough because they were busy trying to impress each other, which I mean I get, nothing sexier than a good con, but—”

“Tyson,” Gabe cuts him off. His head tilts. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You ramble when you’re lying.”

Tyson scoffs. “I’m a con, I don’t ramble.”

Gabe smiles again, a little like he’s laughing at Tyson but more like he wants to smile at him. “You do when you aren’t on a job. Well, on a job too. Except you manage to make it work when you get out of the van.”

“Or it’s why you don’t let me out of the van,” Tyson counters. Gabe’s right, of course, because he knows Tyson, or he knew him, which isn’t the same thing but might be close enough. But just because he’s right doesn’t mean he won’t be distracted.

“I thought you liked the van.”

“Oh yeah, me and the van, she’s my girl, you know that. We’re besties forever.” Tyson nods. “Don’t tell Nate.”

Gabe’s head tips back as he laughs, and the sun catches in his hair. “I won’t tell, promise,” Gabe tells him, grinning and leaning in, and Tyson can feel himself swaying forward too, into the push pull of their easy flirting. Into Gabe’s orbit.

He takes a breath. “But I’ll take care of it,” he says, stepping back. Gabe’s smile fades. “Don’t worry. I won’t let them mess it up.”

“I know you won’t,” Gabe tells him. Sure. He’s so sure of Tyson. Tyson doesn’t know why—why he and Nate wanted Tyson. Tyson’s the one who had fucked up, and gotten them all here. But Gabe’s still looking at him like he believes in Tyson.

But then again, he never doubted what Tyson could do. Or what he would. He’d always believed in Tyson. It always got him what he wanted.

But Gabe’s not done. “We’ve got to make sure they don’t make our mistakes, yeah?” he goes on, and he’s looking at Tyson, so intent.

Tyson shrugs. “They aren’t us, Gabe. They’re—they’re getting there, but they’ll be good.” They love each other, he doesn’t say, even if it’s still mixed up for some reason. They aren’t one side fruitlessly pining and the other side fond but dismissive. They aren’t the sort of blind adoration that leads them here.

“Are you saying we weren’t good?” Gabe asks, and steps forward. He’s getting close to Tyson. He still smells good, like he always has. “You’re only thinking about the bad stuff, but we were good, Tys. We were great.”

Tyson almost smiles, because they had been, and he knows it. Can remember it, that feeling as good as any drug he’s tried when a job’s complete and he looks at the score, and there’s Gabe’s grin and Nate’s beam and all the rest of them and the beer and the wine and the vodka because they’d had shitty taste in alcohol and Gabe would smile at him with his eyes sparkling and it was like it was just the two of them. And under all of that the thrum of knowing they’d gotten away with it, they’d won, and that was as good as all the rest of it too.

And then—Tyson doesn’t smile, because he remembers the rest of it too, and that taints all the rest.

Gabe doesn’t move. He’s still watching Tyson. “Tys…”

“I’ll fix it,” Tyson says. “Did you need anything else?”

Gabe’s eyes are very big and very blue, and almost soft. “Not if you don’t want anything,” he says, and Tyson is still trying to pick that apart when he leaves.

Really, trust Gabe to be so confusing, he thinks, as he sits back down at the desk, to finish scrubbing Josty and Comphy from the record. What does that mean, Tyson doesn’t want anything. Tyson wants a lot of things. He wants the job to go well. He wants Roy to burn. He wants to sleep. He wants to be able to be in a room with Gabe and be able to breathe easy. He wants to undo the past four years. He wants to go home to his lake. He wants to not be in love with Gabe anymore. He wants that love to be uncomplicated again.

None of that is anything Gabe can give him, though. And none of that is something Gabe asks of him. If Gabe asked something of him, Tyson could figure out if he wanted to give it to him.

The problem is it’s all things Tyson asks of himself, and he’s always been worse at dealing with that.

 _So it was Gabe, then?_ Lauren’s replied. _I thought he’d stopped making me clean up his messes_.

Tyson almost laughs again. _Not him either. Or no more than usual._

 _Are you okay?_ She asks, because she—she had to know more than anyone but Nate, so she could make sure the story was contained, that Jenkins’ family didn’t ask questions about the money in their bank account, that the police didn’t ask the wrong questions. _If you need to talk, I told you, I have someone._

 _I’m better than I have been_ , he replies. It’s probably a lie. She’d been trying to find him a therapist for years, and he probably should have listened, but—not thinking about it is easier. Or it was, when he could do that. Now that Gabe’s here, that he has to face it. Except Gabe’s being—he doesn’t know what.   _This time it was some other young idiots, though. Keep an eye out, please?_

 _Tell them this is their first warning_ , she says, which Tyson is not going to do because they both know she doesn’t mean it. She’s smoothed over plenty of all of their more public mistakes. _And take care of yourself._

Tyson actually laughs out loud. _Why start now?_ He asks, and goes back to his computer.

///

As the time for the job gets closer, everyone gets more on edge. It manifests differently, but not unexpectedly, for everyone. Nate starts to micromanage, pushing at everyone to make sure everything’s perfect, because that’s how he can feel like he can control everything. EJ spends a lot of time playing his horse games on his phone and more watching races and losing more money than Tyson wants to keep track of. The rookies are all going out and drinking probably more than is smart, but they’ve come back every day and Tyson, who’s almost always awake, has seen them stumble back, and seen how Josty grabs onto Comphy’s shirt and drag him into his room, as Kerfy rolls his eyes at them. They’re also getting more reckless with the safe; Tyson is starting to suspect this is some sort of sex bet or something given how often and intensely they steal specific things that aren’t actually that valuable. He sort of wants to ask and sort of really doesn’t want to know. It’s been a good distraction, at least, picking apart the protections around the safe.

Gabe paces and talks and gets loud and dramatic, with everything from more temper outbreaks to big expressions of his love for his team to pranks to the way he glows and snaps at everyone. He’s always seemed to get bigger, the closer he gets to a job. Or maybe it’s just bigger in Tyson’s mind.

He’s changed, though, Tyson thinks, as he deals with his own neuroses with his checking and double checking his research, scraping every bit of information he can, sitting in the corner of Nate’s suite. He used to—Tyson remembers how big he’d get, how he’d pace and fuss and go out with the kids, flirting and dancing and maybe pulling a random job with them—hell, he’d be at them with the safe, not for whatever sex thing they were doing but because he loved it.

Now, he stays in the room, and shakes his head as the rookies come back, and it’s—Tyson doesn’t know what it means.

“Tyson,” Josty complains, as he throws himself down onto the couch next to Tyson and grins up at him. It’s a very charming grin, as he well knows. “Come on. You should come with us.”

Tyson laughs and rolls his eyes. “I don’t think you need a chaperone.”

“I don’t want a chaperone,” Josty retorts. “I want someone to come be fun with me.”

“Hey!” Comphy protests. Josty waves a hand at him.

“Someone else,” he says, with a sidelong look at Comphy that makes it clear he falls into a different category.

“Hey!”

“Someone _else_ ,” Josty tells Kerfy. He glances at Gabe, next, which puts Tyson on edge. There’s no reason for him to look at Gabe now. “Tyson, come on. You used to be fun.”

“I am fun,” Tyson protests. “I just don’t want to go out, that’s not not being fun.”

“Remember Tyson squared?” Josty presses, and smiles, cheeky. Tyson doesn’t know why he thinks that’ll work—Tyson taught him that cheeky smile. “Why don’t you want to do that anymore?” He asks, and Tyson, because he’s never lost this sense, knows Gabe is shifting.

He turns. Looks at Gabe, who is in fact watching them. “Did you put him up to this?” he asks, and Gabe must not have been expecting that sort of direct question because there’s a split second, too quick for anyone who didn’t know him, of surprise before it’s shut down.

“Why would I put him up to this?” he asks, smooth as silk. “I don’t care if you go out and have fun. We don’t need you to do anything here right now.”

Tyson narrows his eyes at Gabe. He’s meddling, again, pushing, and Tyson doesn’t—he doesn’t want to go out. He hasn’t, really, since the first few months after the fire when he drank to stop the nightmares and the memory of Gabe in handcuffs, looking at him through the security camera as the cops took him away, until Nate sat him down and told him how worried he was. He’s been out of the game anyway, away from the friends he’d have gone out with. And if he were to go out, what was he supposed to do, meet someone and have to tell them why he didn’t sleep, why his past was shadowed, why he couldn’t go back to his world? He’d preferred his lake and those friends he had, who knew and didn’t ask.

So he doesn’t want to go out, even if years ago he would have too, sure, gone out and found a warm body and someone who would laugh at his jokes and look at him like they wanted him and who he could learn for a night.

“I don’t know, why would you?” he asks, still watching Gabe. Behind him, Nate’s looking between them, fast and a little nervous, but then his gaze settles on Tyson, a clear assurance in that look—that if Tyson doesn’t want this, if he really can’t handle it, Nate will shut it down.

“He didn’t,” Josty contributes, and Comphy nods enthusiastically, which confirms what Tyson thought. Gabe definitely manufactured this.

“I don’t know why I would,” Gabe replies. “But you have been in the hotel for a while. And you’ll be in the van for a while. It could be nice to get out.” He raises an eyebrow, and it’s a clear challenge—he doesn’t think Tyson’s going to go. Or he thinks Tyson’s going to think he doesn’t think Tyson’s going to go. Or he thinks Tyson’s going to think that Gabe’s going to think that Tyson’s going to think that he doesn’t think Tyson’s going to go, and Tyson could go on like this forever, but this isn’t what he does. He doesn’t think like this. He thinks in code and the most efficient path from A to B. And many things may have changed, but he still rises to a challenge.

“Fine,” he snaps, and stands up. Josty springs back, and Gabe’s eyes widen, like he hadn’t actually expected Tyson to do it. “Fine.” He glares. “Fine,” he says again, because it’s all he can say. Fine. He can do this. He’ll be this person.  

“Great!” Josty bunces up. “Go get changed, we’ll wait.”

“Fine,” Tyson says a fourth time, gives the whole room a glare, his gaze scraping over Gabe, and slams the door on his way out.

There’s a knock on his door a few minutes later, as Tyson paws through the closet for something that’s fitting for going out. He definitely has things. “Come on in,” he calls, and Nate comes in.

“You okay?” he asks, looking all concerned and managing. Tyson smiles. He loves Nate, but Nate’s carrying so much on his shoulders these days; he’s not putting his shit there more than he has to.

“I’m good,” he tells Nate, who doesn’t look convinced.

“I can get Josty and them off your back,” he says slowly, sitting down on Tyson’s bed. His shoulders sag a little bit as he does.

“ _I_ can get Josty off my back, if I wanted to,” Tyson tells him. Which is true, he thinks. Probably. Josty’s stubborn when he wants to be. “Don’t worry about me.”

Nate snorts. “Worrying about you is easier than worrying about everything else.”

“Maybe you should come out with us tonight too, then,” Tyson suggests, and then gives a little cry of triumph when he finds a shirt that’s tight enough to pass muster. That gets another laugh from Nate.

“I have to check in with the florist, and Z’s reporting back tonight to confirm Roy’s on the plane, and the ski poles have to be delivered, and I need to—”

“Okay, I get it,” Tyson cuts him off, because having that many balls in the air is giving him a sympathy headache. He does one thing, and it’s bad enough, knowing what’ll happen if he doesn’t do it well. Nate’s smile back at him is weak, though, so he adds, “I want you to know, if I ever get married, you are planning it.”

It gets a bigger smile. “What, I’m planner, not best man?”

“Of course you’re best man,” Tyson scoffs. Honestly. “I have faith you can do both.” It gets an even bigger smile out of Nate. “Anyway, there’s not a high chance I’ll get married, so it’s kind of moot, but—”

“Why not?”

Tyson tries to shrug as he puts his shirt on, which means both end up sort of halfway done. “I’m way too fucked up.” Nate still looks skeptical and a little sad. “I mean, what can I explain to them? Yeah, we should definitely be in a relationship, I killed someone and I still can’t get over the guy who got me to do it even though that’s been unrequited since I was twenty?”

It comes out bleaker than he meant, maybe; from the pained expression on Nate’s face, it was definitely dark. Or maybe he meant it that dark.

“Brutes…”

“No, don’t.” Tyson shakes his head, and turns his back on Nate to fix his hair. He can still see him in the mirror, can still see the way Nate is looking at him, pitying and worried and with so much love Tyson doesn’t deserve. Nate opens his mouth. “Don’t. It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Nate argues, but he lets out a breath, and clearly lets Tyson make him let it go. “You’re sure you’re going to have fun tonight?”

Tyson’s not. Tyson doesn’t know if he wants to do this, doesn’t know if he’ll be able to without feeling guilty, doesn’t know if he won’t have an anxiety attack in the middle of a club. But he can’t back down now. He can’t—he knows Gabe is manipulating him again, is trying to get him to do something, and he thinks this is him making a choice in the face of that.

“Yeah,” he says, and Nate’s expression tells him he’ll let him have the lie.

The bar Josty’s found for them is the sort of place that on anything but weekends is probably just a bar, but becomes more of a club on weekend nights, filled with the visitors to the resort who want to let off some steam away from the slopes and the resort, the resort staff who want to do something other than drink with each other, and some locals who want to laugh at the vacationers.

And them, which is maybe a different category, because they’re there for work but it’s a different work, and Tyson knows they’re watching the crowd differently than anyone else does, unless there are other cons in the club. Which there might be; Tyson can’t help but notice that no one is paying attention to pockets or wallets and especially the people coming from the resort probably have plenty to play with in those pockets.

But that’s not what they’re there for. What they’re there for is to dance and drink, and Josty is clearly under instructions and on a mission because he drags Tyson into the fray, the others herding him from behind. Then there’s some sort of fruity cocktail shoved into his hands, and then—

It is fun, is what he maybe didn’t remember. That there’s another bit of adrenaline rush to this, to being out among people, to joke with his friends and with the other people he meets, to watch them look at him with a smile and flirtation, who looks at him and don’t know anything about him. To drink and feel it buzz through him and know that there are other people there to make sure he doesn’t fuck anything up, that he won’t do anything stupid.

He’s not drunk, just a little tipsy, when he falls back against the bar from making a fool of himself dancing. It’s drunker than he’s been recently, though, or maybe that interim level of drunk that he hasn’t been—not the sort of black out to drive everything out of his brain, but not sober either. His brain is just sort of—fizzing, not working too hard, not worrying or thinking, and it’s relaxing, to let it do that.

Still—Kerfy’s dancing with a girl, who looks like she’s into it, which he seems surprised by but also into; Comphy and Josty are Not Dancing Together but making aggressive eye contact that makes Tyson laugh to himself, a little. They’re so simple and so complicated and so far away from all the things Tyson’s worried about.

“Ten bucks says they end up fucking,” comes a voice behind Tyson, pitched just loud enough for him to hear over the music.

Tyson jumps. Spins. Gabe’s there, smiling at him in that way that makes it seem like he’s laughing at him, and he’s in his ridiculously tight jeans and a blue shirt that brings out the color of his eyes and makes his shoulders look climbable, and he knows that. Knows what he does, when he grins at Tyson like that.

“Why are you here?” Tyson demands. This was supposed to be—he was supposed to be getting away from everything. Gabe is everything he needs to get away from.

Gabe shrugs. “There wasn’t anything more for me to do. And Nate got fed up with me.”

He’s lying, it’s clear. Tyson doesn’t feel like calling him on it. “Was this part of your plan?”

“My plan?”

“You know. How you decided I should go out so you manipulated me into doing it.” Maybe Tyson’s drunker than he thought. He usually doesn’t say this shit out loud. “I do know what you’re doing, even if I’m not sure I can stop it.”

Gabe’s face does something Tyson’s too drunk to decipher, to pick through the layers of conning and truth. “I didn’t mean to manipulate you,” he says, softer. “I just—wanted to give you the opportunity, if you wanted to take it.”

“Why?” Tyson asks. He’s not sure what he means by it. There’s a lot of whys he can’t figure out, with Gabe.

Gabe hand goes out, like he means to touch Tyson, and Tyson doesn’t know what’ll happen if he does so he’s already moving away when his hand stops. Drops. “I just want to see you happy,” he says, like he means it, and that’s too much. If he wanted that, he’s years too late. If he wanted that, he shouldn’t be so confusing. If he wanted that, he should—not look like he does, and smile at Tyson, and do the thing he’s done for years where he sucks Tyson in when Tyson’s on the edge of too drunk to resist.

“No bet,” he says instead of all that, because he’s not drunk enough for this. “About Comphy and Josty. That’s a sucker’s bet, and I’m not always a sucker.” He picks up his drink, and goes to brave the crowd again.

He doesn’t lose Gabe in it. Instead, Gabe stays close; not close enough to touch, but enough that Tyson can’t escape him.

He’s most of the way to the other side of the dance floor, when Gabe leans in, so his breath is warm against Tyson’s neck. “Do you have your phone?”

Tyson scoffs. “Yes, Gabe, I’m not an idiot,” he retorts.

For some reason, that gets a pleased smile from Gabe. “Want to have some fun, then?” he asks, and Tyson freezes, because he’s had dreams about Gabe purring that in his ear and stepping closer, like he’s doing now, and it’s all—

Then something drops into his pocket, and Gabe is still somehow managing to loom without touching Tyson. Tyson reaches into his pocket, pulls it out—Gabe’s lifted a wallet belonging to a Hercules Stevens, IV. There’s a black Amex in it, and many other cards, and a DC license. 

Tyson raises his eyebrows, even though he knows Gabe can’t see him. “I’ll put it back,” Gabe murmurs from behind him. It makes more sense, now. This is a good reason to stand close, to look secretive—if it looks like Gabe’s coming on to him, no one will question what they’re doing. “But we can have some fun.”

“We have a big job to pull in like three days,” Tyson points out, but his hand is twitching towards his phone, to see if he can get into these accounts. It’s a silly little game they’d used to play, where Gabe would lift wallets of people they decided seemed like shitty people and Tyson would see what they could figure out from them and how they could either siphon some money off them and how to embarrass them. It had been practice for them both, once, to see how fast they could get in and out. Then it had just been a game.

“You saying you can’t do it anymore?” Gabe asks, a dare and a promise.

“It’s a stupid idea.” Tyson swallows, glancing down at the Amex. He bets the password to that account isn’t complicated. “What if I—”

“You can do this in your sleep,” Gabe informs him. “And even if something happens, it won’t mean anything for the job. We’re too far away. It’s safe.”

Tyson’s breath lets out. Gabe’s thought about this. It isn’t a whim, it’s not just him being reckless and pulling Tyson into it. Gabe is daring him, and Tyson’s still Tyson, and he’s drunk and this is—he doesn’t have it in him to resist this.

“What did he do?” Tyson asks, and pulls out his phone. Phones aren’t the easiest to work on, but it’ll do.

He can almost feel Gabe’s grin at his back. “He was yelling at the bartender,” Gabe informs him, and Tyson hums.

“That’s bullshit,” he says, “Let’s see what we can do.”

They go through Hercules, who deserves it just for his name, and then some woman who was insulting other women who looked like her friends behind their back, then Tyson destroys the credit score of a guy who was definitely not taking no for an answer as Gabe actually stepped in, because sometimes immediate intervention is necessary, and it is fun. It’s fun in a way Tyson had forgotten, or blocked, because this is the sort of fun that isn’t safe, that he doesn’t trust himself to make safe anymore. But it’s the game for the sake of the game, and at the end of the day he loves the game.

Then—“How’d you get this?” Tyson asks, and takes the phone Gabe slips into his palm, still unlocked, and snorts at the background Josty’d set up, which is a selfie with him and a bunch of his friends shirtless on a beach. Josty’s arm is thrown over Comphy’s shoulders in the middle of the pic. “He shouldn’t be that careless.”

“Or I’m just that good,” Gabe says, haughty. “Besides. He’s distracted.” He jerks his head, and Tyson follows the gesture over Gabe’s shoulder to where Josty is glaring daggers at the guy Comphy’s dancing with, enough that he’s clearly not paying attention even to the girl he’s with.

Tyson snorts, and then flicks through the phone. He doesn’t actually read through Josty’s texts, because he’s not a monster, but—“Flowers for Comphy, do you think?” he suggests, and Gabe chuckles. He’s basically pinning Tyson against the wall—for verisimilitude, Tyson supposes, though this is closer than they used to do; he can’t think about it right now. How Gabe’s got his hand on the wall next to Tyson’s shoulder and is leaning in, blocking out the rest of the world.  

“Flowers for sure. Can you get a text onto his phone that looks like it’s from Comphy?”

“Who do you think I am, Gabriel?” Tyson retorts, futzing with the phone. It does help that he’s had his hands on all of their phones before; undoing his own security is easy enough. But if Josty’s going to be this careless with his shit, he deserves it. You can’t get distracted by being in love. Tyson’s a hypocrite, he’s expected that. “What do we want to say, a love confession?”

“No, don’t take that from them.” Gabe makes a considering noise. “What about just telling him that he has a surprise for him tonight?”

“They’re definitely already sleeping together, that won’t help. We need something that’ll make them get over themselves and just tell each other that they’re serious about it.”

“And how do you impress it on someone, that you’re serious?” Gabe asks. He’s looking down at Tyson now, somehow still through his lashes, and the lights are flashing over him. He looks at home here too. He looks good everywhere. “If you didn’t realize you were before, but you need them to understand it now?”

Tyson looks back down at his phone. “I don’t know why it’s hard for them,” He says. “It’s simple. They both love each other and it’s clear.”

“What if it isn’t?” Gabe presses. He’s still so carefully not touching. “Maybe Josty made a mistake, and it cost, and—”

“Don’t,” Tyson warns, because this has been—it’s been a good night. It’s been reminding him, that he and Gabe were friends before they were anything else, and that was fun. That he can have fun like this, and it won’t hurt anyone. He can like Gabe again, as a person, and that can be it. He doesn’t want to think past it, to Gabe’s looks and his gifts and all the other complicated things.

Gabe lets out a long breath, though his jaw’s still set, stubbornly, and he really looks like he’d like to say something else. “Okay. Fine.” He nods, like to himself. “So, the flowers?”

“Flowers,” Tyson agrees, and opens the website on Josty’s phone.

They get back by 2—or, Kerfy’s disappeared, which, props; and Josty and Comphy are giggling into each other’s shoulders and Tyson thinks they might think they’re being subtle with how Comphy’s hand is inching into Josty’s pants. They definitely aren’t subtle when they tell Gabe and Tyson good night, and Josty assures him with big innocent eyes that “this was so much fun you should do this again, right Gabe?” and then they both fall into Josty’s room. Tyson really wants to see Comphy’s face when he gets the flowers.

Then it’s just Gabe and Tyson in the hallway, and Tyson’s room is right there. Tyson yawns.

“Tired?” Gabe asks, sounding all concerned and warm.

Tyson shrugs. “I’m always tired.” It doesn’t change Gabe’s expression. “Maybe I’m drunk enough to sleep, though.”

“I hope so.” Gabe swallows, and his fingers twitch, which is as much of a tell as Tyson thinks he’ll let himself. “I hope you had fun.”

“You shouldn’t have manipulated me into this,” Tyson tells him, because he shouldn’t. Because he’s still using Tyson, in his way. “But it was fun.”

“I didn’t—okay.” Gabe nods, and he takes a step forward. “I’m trying, Tys,” he says, all earnest and gorgeous and magnetic. “I really am.”

Tyson blinks at him. He’s tipsy and tired and they should go to sleep, or what passes for sleep. “Why?” he asks, because that’s what it boils down to. “You never did before.”

“I—” Gabe opens his mouth, closes it. Like he’s really thinking about it. “How drunk are you?”

“Drunk. Not too drunk. I don’t know.”

“That’s too drunk,” Gabe decides, and Tyson glares, because Gabe doesn’t get to decide that shit for him. “Go to sleep, Tyson. Or try.”

“I probably won’t be able to,” Tyson tells him. Maybe he is drunk, if he’s saying this. He shouldn’t be saying this. This is the shit that makes people worry about him.

“Try,” Gabe orders, and then makes a face at himself. “I mean—you should probably try.” He runs a hand back through his hair. “I had fun with you tonight.”

“Yeah,” Tyson admits, with a sigh more than anything, because this is the unfortunate truth of him, that after everything, all the complexities between them—Gabe’s still Gabe. All the blame can’t change that. “Me too.”

///

Tyson gets a little bit of sleep, but he’s still up and in Nate’s suite early enough that he can see how Comphy sputters, when the flowers arrive, delivered from the front desk by a smirking Kerfy. Josty, who apparently hasn’t checked his bank account, also starts sputtering and glaring and then puts on the world’s least convincing grin to start teasing Comphy about a secret admirer. Comphy, whose face had started to soften at the flowers, droops all at once, and Tyson’s pretty sure it’s because he thinkns the flowers aren’t from Josty.

“We should have added a note,” Tyson says, when he more feels than hears Gabe come up behind him. He’s still watching the rookie drama.

“Probably,” Gabe agrees. He sets down a cup of coffee next to Tyson’s keyboard, one Tyson knows well by now. This is weeks of this. Of coffee and treats and Gabe last night. 

He eyes it, then turns in his chair to eye Gabe, who’s watching him job falls together. “Do you want something?” he asks.

Gabe twitches. “What?”

“Do you—is that why you’re giving me coffee?” Tyson asks. That would make sense. “Is it a bribe?”

“No.” Gabe sounds more sure about that. “No, it—it’s just coffee, Tyson.”

Tyson can feel his mouth twist. “What kind of con are you?” he asks. Cons don’t give things away for free. Cons always want something more. And Gabe’s a good con.

“One who wants you to have coffee you like,” Gabe tells him, and that’s—it’s not an answer, not really. “If you aren’t going to be able to sleep, you should get the sugar you like.”

“I…” Tyson trails off. Gabe’s still watching him, so intent, and there’s too much that could mean. Gabe just wants Tyson to be in good shape for the job, probably. Maybe. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Tyson repeats. “Okay, you don’t have an ulterior motive, I accept that.” He doesn’t, but he can say it at least. He wants to believe it. He wants to believe it too much, so he shouldn’t. He wants to be able to believe it. “I need to get to work.”

“Do you want quiet?” Gabe asks, and Tyson blinks at him again. He knows Gabe’s been doing this, herding people out, but as long as they hadn’t said anything about it, he didn’t have to think about it. Think about really why Gabe was doing it, and what he might want, or mean.

“No,” he says slowly. “I’m okay with the noise.”

Gabe grins at him, toothy and bright. “Enjoy your coffee,” is all he says, and then he’s off to talk to Nate, who’s looking a question at Tyson. Tyson shrugs back.

 _No safecracking today?_ Pops up on his screen, from Lauren. _The children are getting boring._

 _They’re just scared of you_ , Tyson tells her. Gabe’s still talking to Nate, so he takes a sip of his coffee. It’s as perfectly sweet as always. _And Gabe and I maybe fucked with them a little yesterday._

 _Gabe and you?_ She repeats. _Tyson…_

 _I don’t know_ , he sends back, because—that’s the bottom of line of it, isn’t it. He doesn’t know. He never knows enough. He thought he did, but he can’t, and it’s always what he doesn’t know that’s the danger.

///

Roy comes back to town, Z and Barbs behind him. The flowers arrive. The uniforms come in. Tyson finally gets all the cameras in place. Then everything is set, and there’s nothing more to do, except to wait the twelve hours until the morning, when everything starts.

“Get some sleep tonight,” Gabe tells everyone, as they disperse for the night from Nate’s suite. “It’ll be a long day tomorrow.”

“What Gabe means less ominously,” Nate corrects, rolling his eyes, “Is to get rest tonight, because we’re going until sunrise two days from now.” Tyson doesn’t want to say that Nate’s especially looking at him, but he feels like everyone glances his way. Gabe definitely does.

“See you in the morning,” Gabe adds, then gets up, which everyone else takes as their cue to get up.

They don’t leave right away. Instead, they filter out—the guys with wives go to call them, some video games come out to play away the tension. Tyson sits at his computer, goes over the plan. The pressure points. Tries to think of what he doesn’t know, what might be the contingencies that come up. He’s not great at thinking like that, but he needs to now. They can’t leave anything to chance.

Slowly, everyone does start to leave, until finally Tyson does too, because Nate’s giving him worried looks and Tyson wants him to stop. So he goes to his room.

He even tries to sleep, he does. He lies down and closes his eyes and tries not to think about anything to go to sleep. He tries to do all the breathing exercises he’d looked up, all the shit he’s ever done that gets him to a place where he can sleep.

It’s late, by the time he gives up. Late, and the walls of the bedroom feel like they’re closing in, so he takes his laptop, and brings it out to the balcony.

It’s still cold there, but Tyson can deal with cold. Cold is better than heat. And he can breathe out here, in the cool crisp air, and go over everything again.

“Can’t sleep?” Gabe asks, and Tyson turns.

He’s on his own balcony next door, leaning on the railing, wearing pajama pants that are somehow still indecently tight and a hoodie from some Swedish sports team. He looks warm. Tyson sighs.

“No.” He pauses, but, “You?”

“No.” Gabe runs his hand through his hair. “What are you doing?”

“Double checking.”

“Tyson, nothing’s going to change in the next six hours.”

“I can know more,” Tyson insists. He needs to know more. “Why can’t you sleep?”

Gabe shrugs. “Nerves. Excitement. Caffeine. I don’t know.” He tilts his head at Tyson. “You should sleep.”

“No duh,” Tyson tells him. “I tried. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

There are so many reasons why not. So many. But—“I need to do more research,” Tyson tells him, and keeps typing. “I have to be sure I haven’t missed anything.”

Gabe gives him a long look—then he nods. “Want company?”

Tyson does. Tyson doesn’t. Not when it’s Gabe, looking warm and friendly, not when Tyson’s worried he might vibrate out of his skin. Not when he can still think about the last job he’d done, and how the night before he hadn’t known that it would be his last job, that it would end in fires and prison and Dutchy walking and—this.

“I don’t know,” he tells Gabe, because that’s the best he can do.

Gabe looks at him again—then he grins, and hops up onto the railing. “What?” Tyson startles, half yelling. “Gabe, what are you—”

“Want company?” Gabe asks again, eying the distance between their balconies. And not particularly the four stories below them.

“Not if it means you’re going to die!” Tyson protests, but Gabe’s grinning and he can’t help smiling too. Gabe isn’t a cat-burglar or anything but Tyson does know he’s done shit like this before. “You need to be alive for the job together, holy shit—”

“Tell me not to and I won’t,” Gabe tells him, sparkling, and Tyson eyes the ground, then him, and doesn’t know what to say.

“Okay.” Gabe swings himself off, and Tyson’s breath catches—but he grabs onto the ledge, and scoots across the brick façade the few feet until he grabs onto the railings of Tyson’s balcony, and can pull himself up.

He tumbles onto the concrete, comes up flushed and grinning and so smug, enough that Tyson has to laugh and roll his eyes. “What the hell was that?”

“I couldn’t sit still any longer,” Gabe shrugs, and despite that throws himself onto the loveseat sitting next to Tyson’s chair. “It was too small.”

“That why you couldn’t sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gabe says, less like he’s lying and more like he’s not sure himself. “What are you working on?”

“Research, I told you.”

“You’ve already looked into everything.”

“Not everything,” Tyson tells him. Now that Gabe’s back on solid ground and not flinging himself off of buildings, he’s goes back to his screens. He can always find out more.

“Everything we need for the job,” Gabe corrects, and he sounds concerned again. “What more do you need?”

“I don’t know!” Tyson’s voice is suddenly loud. “I don’t know, but if it’s there, I need to find it. It’s what I do. I need to know everything, because if I fuck up and don’t know it, then people die.”

Gabe’s indrawn breath echoes in the night air. Tyson’s does too.

“Tys, it wasn’t—”

“If I had known that he didn’t build up to code, that the wiring would be overloaded and the fire escapes weren’t right, then we wouldn’t have done it and there wouldn’t have been a fire,” Tyson tells him, tightly. Still staring at the screens, so he doesn’t have to look at Gabe. “I’m not going to fuck up again.”

“You didn’t fuck up.”

“Well someone died anyway, so it looks like I did.”

“Tyson.” Gabe’s hand twitches. “Come on, it’ll be better if you sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“Just a bit,” Gabe coaxes, and he actually sounds worried now. Tyson doesn’t get why. He’s fine. He just—can’t sleep. Has to do this.

“I’m fine, Gabe.”

“You’re not,” Gabe argues, but he sighs. “At least come over here, onto the couch. You can be comfortable while you have a nervous breakdown.”

Tyson really doesn’t want to—really shouldn’t, because moving that close to Gabe is dangerous, because he shouldn’t be comfortable, he needs to do this, but Gabe’s also staring him down, and Tyson’s too tired for an argument.

He gets up, moves to the loveseat. He knows it’s a bad idea as soon as he sits down—the loveseat might be big enough for two people hypothetically, but not when they’re Gabe and Tyson’s size. Instead, their shoulders are pressed together, their thighs and knees warm against each other. Or maybe Tyson’s just fallen into him, like he always does, inevitably, Gabe’s weight drawing him in.

Gabe leans over, which doesn’t help anything, how he leans in and Tyson can feel the warmth of his skin and his smell and hear the soft in and out of his breath. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at Tyson’s screen, even though Tyson knows he doesn’t get most of what’s there. Tyson’s taught him some, over the years, but not all of it.

He doesn’t say anything as Tyson works, and works, and works, just leans against Tyson and breathes. It should be distracting, but Tyson’s worked around Gabe for years, and instead it’s almost soothing. It might be soporific, if Tyson could shut his brain off enough for him to sleep. Instead, it just means that slowly, inch by inch, Tyson relaxes, leaning into Gabe’s shoulder.

“You’ve done this three times,” Gabe says at last, nodding at the screen. Tyson blinks. He had, but he didn’t think Gabe noticed. “Maybe it’s time to call it?”

Tyson shakes his head. He knows what’ll happen if he sleeps, or tries to sleep. “You can go if you want.”

Tyson can feel Gabe shake his head. “I’m good here,” he says, then, slowly, “Do you want to tell me why you can’t stop?”

“I told you. I can’t fuck up again.”

“This isn’t helping, though.”

“It might.” If it helps even a little, it’s been worth it. Tyson turns his head, so it’s mostly in Gabe’s shoulder. He can’t face Gabe as he says this. He can’t face himself. “What if this time—what if it’s the rookies? Or Nate? Or you?” Gabe’s intake of breath might not be loud, but this close, Tyson can hear it. “I can’t let that happen. I won’t be able to just—pay blood money to support your family and deal with the nightmares, if it’s you guys. I need to make sure I don’t—”

“Tyson,” Gabe interrupts him, and Tyson stops. Looks up at Gabe, who’s looking down at him like—like something Tyson can’t quantify, like he’s seeing into Tyson, like he’s in pain. “You didn’t.”

“I did, though,” Tyson argues, “You said it yourself, if I’d known—”

“You can’t kill yourself with ifs.”

Tyson snorts. “Tell that to my brain,” He says, and lets his head fall back onto Gabe’s shoulder. “It’s all ifs. If I’d known. If you hadn’t told me. If Dutchy hadn’t left. If Roy hadn’t been such a dick. If I’d been smart enough not to do it. If I—”

“You can’t do this to yourself,” Gabe says, almost gentle, though Tyson can feel his hand flex on his thigh. He used to be physical with Tyson, to hug him and pull him where he wanted and touch him all the time, and Tyson had fallen into that. He doesn’t do that anymore. It could just be part of a con, to dole the touch out sparingly, or it could be something else. Who knows. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

“It’s too late for that,” Tyson scoffs. Gabe smiles, but he doesn’t laugh like everyone always does at Tyson’s self-deprecation. He just looks worried, still. “Don’t worry,” Tyson goes on. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I can function without sleep.”

“That’s not—really, Tyson?” Gabe asks, and now he sounds hurt, which is bullshit and also something Gabe does, sometimes. Tyson’s seen him pull the wounded bird routine on marks before. “I’m not concerned because of the job.”

Tyson sighs, and lifts his head. Gabe’s looking at him in that same way, hurt and in pain, like those are different things, and something else, too, something Tyson’s never seen directed at him—the weirdness of the past few weeks, something like fondness. It’s a devastating sort of look, the sort of look that would have taken him out at the knees before, the sort that still settles in his stomach and hums in his bones. It’s the sort of look he doesn’t trust, because Gabe knows all that. “Then why are you?” he asks, because he’s too tired to lie, or pretend he’s someone else.

“Because I’m worried about you,” Gabe answers. “Because—fuck, Tyson. Because I care about you,” he says, and it resonates in Tyson’s bones. He leans in, his voice dropping, going rough. “Because I want you to be happy. Because I want to be the person who makes you smile again.” He’s barely a breath away from Tyson now, and his gaze flicks down to Tyson’s lips, unsubtle in a way that means he meant Tyson to notice, and Tyson goes rigid and hot all at once. Gabe’s never looked at him like _that_ before.

“Gabe,” Tyson breathes. “Gabe, what are you…”

“Because,” Gabe goes on, and he’s so close, half-looming in a way that makes him encompassing, until all of Tyson’s world is Gabe. “You need to get out of your head,” he purrs, and he’s looking at Tyson’s lips again, and his knee is warm against Tyson’s and Tyson knows what Gabe looks like when he wants to kiss someone and he’s looking at Tyson like that.

“Gabe,” Tyson breathes again, or maybe he squeaks, but either way—he doesn’t know what’s happening. This feels like a dream. He doesn’t know Gabe’s play here. He doesn’t know how to handle Gabe looking at him like this. He doesn’t know why. He’s wanted this with Gabe for years, and now he can’t look away from his lips. He wants—

“Do you want this?” Gabe asks, his voice tighter now, and Tyson can feel him quivering next to him, like he’s holding himself back by a thread. “Tys, I’m not going to do this unless—can I kiss you?” Tyson’s mouth opens. Closes. “ _Tyson_ ,” Gabe repeats, and it sounds like a plea, and he’s still looking at Tyson like he wants this, wants him, and Tyson probably shouldn’t, but he’s so tired and he’s been trying to hold out for so long.

“Yes,” He says, and it feels inevitable. “Yes, Gabe, fuck, yes—”

“Thank god,” Gabe gets out, then he is, all soft lips and his beard scraping against Tyson’s cheeks, and he’s really doing this, he’s really kissing Gabe, and Gabe’s kissing him, and Tyson’s wanted this for so long but now that it’s here he doesn’t know how to handle it. He just—he wants. He wants to stop thinking. He wants to feel good again. He wants Gabe to keep kissing him and never stop.

Gabe seems to agree on that last one. He keeps kissing Tyson, long slow kisses that suck Tyson in, that keep him there, so that whenever Tyson starts to think about anything else Gabe nips at his lip, and the sting of pain keeps him there, with Gabe’s lips and his hair twined in Tyson’s fingers and his hands moving, moving, moving, skimming Tyson’s jaw, his shoulders, his sides, light enough that it’s a tease; with Gabe’s whole—body, looming forward until Tyson tips backwards on the couch and tugs Gabe down with him. This much, he knows; this much, his body knows, at least.

Gabe catches himself with a hand on the edge of the couch, looks down at Tyson. He’s backlit by the balcony light, like they’re in an island of light that’s filtered through the gold of Gabe’s hair and the light blue of his sweatshirt, and his eyes are dark as they focus on Tyson, like Tyson’s seen him look before but never at Tyson. It’s as drugging as his kisses, that look. Tyson gets it, why his marks melt for him. Tyson’s melting too, he thinks. He can’t not. Can’t not get swept into this, but he’s done that before, got swept into Gabe, and he didn’t know enough, and if he does it again—

“Tyson,” Gabe says, low and sharp and sure, and Tyson looks at him again. “There you go,” he says, softer, and then he’s kissing Tyson again, and Tyson arches up into him, wanting more, wanting everything.

“There you go,” Tyson repeats back to him, his fingers tightening in Gabe’s hair, “As far as I can see, I’m not going anywhere.”

“You aren’t,” Gabe agrees, dark and fierce, and his teeth bite into Tyson’s collarbone, enough to make Tyson groan and squirm under him. “Except—fuck, we can’t do this.”

Tyson freezes. Feels himself go cold again, suddenly noticing he’s outside in the Rockies in March. Of course. Of course Gabe can’t. Why should Tyson get this, he—Gabe doesn’t want this, Gabe’s never wanted this, not really, he’s just doing some game, he’s—

“Not here, I meant,” Gabe keeps going, and there’s that weird note in his look now, as he looks down at Tyson. “Can I—can we go inside?”

“What, you don’t want to fuck out here in the open air?” Tyson asks, and he knows he’s a little red at assuming that, but he has to. Bravado’s what he has left. “I thought you liked people looking at you.”

Gabe rolls his eyes, but his lips twitch, and his finger traces down Tyson’s cheek. “It’s cold. This couch is not big enough for us.” His smile’s wry. “We can do better than this.”

“I—” If they go inside, this is going to be real. It’s not just this weird dream Tyson’s having, it’s not his head twisting him in circles, giving him what he’s wanted as he’s not sure what it means, if he can take it. And now that they’ve stopped, Tyson realizes—he shouldn’t be doing this. He should be working. He should be—what if something’s going to happen, he needs, he can’t, he has to—

Gabe grabs his wrists before he can go for his computer, mostly on instinct. “Tys. Is there more work you really need to do tonight?”

“I need to—”

“Anything that you wouldn’t be redoing?”

“It’s not like I could sleep anyway,” Tyson retorts, and shifts, but Gabe’s grip on Tyson’s hands is solid, pinning them down next to his head. “I can’t—Gabe, what if—”

“So you don’t have anything you need to do, because you’ve done it all already.” Gabe says it like it’s a fact, like it’s true, like he doesn’t doubt it. “Worrying won’t do any good.”

“You say that like I could stop,” Tyson says, and it comes out tired and bitter. He wants to go back to five minutes ago, when he was still wrapped up in Gabe. He wants his brain to shut up. He wants—

“I could find a way to stop it,” Gabe tells him, and he’s smiling again, a slow smile that’s a sibling to the one Tyson’s seen him use on marks, but isn’t quite it. “Let’s go inside, Tyson.”

“I—” Gabe is looking at him, his eyes dark and liquid and wanting, and Tyson believes him, is the thing, and he’s wanted this for years and he was never going to say no to it, not when it came down to it. He can resist Gabe in parts, but not this. “Yeah. Okay. Inside.”

Gabe grins, then he tugs at Tyson’s wrists until he’s sitting up, then standing, and still Gabe hasn’t let go of his wrists. Instead, he raises them to his lips, kisses the skin at the underside of his wrists, right over his pulse. Tyson shivers, can’t help it, can’t help how it sends fire through his veins.

“Inside,” Gabe repeats, like a promise, and then he’s backing up and Tyson follows, always, and Gabe only lets go of his wrist when he has to to close the door.

Then—they’re inside, in Tyson’s room, and the king bed is just staring at them. Is that what—

“Nope,” Gabe says, nonsensically, then he’s kissing Tyson again, somehow even deeper this time, and his hands roam farther down under Tyson’s shirt and then up under it, the cool of his fingers trailing sparks over Tyson’s skin, and Tyson moans into Gabe’s mouth, pushing up and into him, and this still doesn’t seem real, even as Gabe’s easing his shirt and sweatshirt off together, over his head.

He doesn’t give Tyson a moment to think about what he might look like; instead he’s crowding Tyson back towards the bed and kissing down his neck, and Tyson’s hands are hovering around him—

“You can touch me,” Gabe says into Tyson’s collarbone, his voice low and amused. “It’s actually encouraged.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Tyson mutters back, but it’s so much and he’s been thinking about this for years and he tugs at Gabe’s sweatshirt until it’s off, Gabe moving obliging away so he can untangle it from his arms. Of course, Gabe wasn’t wearing a shirt under it; Tyson manages not to roll his eyes because he’s staring. Gabe’s always been solid and muscled, but prison gyms must not just be a cliché, because he’s all muscle now, and a single tattoo on his ribs that Tyson can’t make out.  

Gabe preens under his look, and that Tyson’s used to, because he’s always enjoyed how Tyson looks at him. How everyone does. It’s why he’s good at what he does, because he makes people look at him, and Tyson’s done it too, is doing it—

“Okay?” Gabe asks, and Tyson blinks.

“Yeah,” he replies, in a manner of speaking.

“Good,” Gabe tells him, then he’s crowding into Tyson’s space again, herding him back until his knees hit the bed. “Good,” he repeats, between kisses, “Good, you’re so—God, Tyson, I just want—”

Then Tyson’s back on the bed, somehow, and Gabe’s looming over him again, no backlit halo just him, but that’s like looking into the sun anyway. “Just focus on me, okay?” he says, and Tyson’s about to demand what he means by that when Gabe’s lips close around one of his nipples, and his fingers flick at the other, and Tyson’s back arches as he groans.

He can’t think about anything else. There’s nothing else in the world, just Gabe’s mouth and his teeth and the warmth of it as it sucks and scrapes at his nipples, as he gets Tyson squirming and shaking under him and he would be embarrassed about how easy he is for this, how on fire Gabe’s set him, except there’s no room for that either. He thinks he’s babbling things, in between moans—things about how gorgeous Gabe is and how much he’s wanted this and how this is a dream and how he can’t think—but it all blurs.

Gabe leaves Tyson’s nipples at last, then starts to explore the rest of his chest, then down his stomach,  and Tyson knows he doesn’t look like Gabe but he’s usually not shy about his body, except that Gabe makes him want to be, or maybe he makes him forget about that, because none of this makes sense anyway. Not what’s happening, and not how Gabe’s touching him, confident and claiming but somehow gentle too, gentle like Tyson doesn’t know, doesn’t know how to deal with.

He gets down to the edge of Tyson’s jeans, then pauses, looks up at Tyson—and Tyson closes his eyes, because he can’t handle what that looks like, Gabe grinning up at him from between his legs. “Can I?” he asks, and Tyson’s voice is definitely steady when he says,

“Yes, please.”

“Good.” Tyson keeps his eyes shut as Gabe eases him out of his pants, his underwear, even his socks, until he’s just naked on the bed in front of Gabe, and he knows Gabe is looking.

He nearly jumps when there’s the touch to his inner thigh, when Gabe’s big hands, warm now, slide up his legs from his knees to his thighs, the nails scraping just enough to bite, until they’re spanning his hipbones, far enough apart so they aren’t touching his already-hard dick but close enough to tease. “Open your eyes.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“It’s not,” Gabe assures him. “C’mon, Tys. Look at me.”

Tyson’s eyes open. Gabe’s still there, between his legs, and he knows his cheeks are as red as they can go, even here, and he really won’t be able to look at that for long or this is going to be over way before they wanted it to be, then he’ll go back to not sleeping and—

Gabe’s hand tightens on his hips, and Tyson’s attention is jerked back to him again. To Gabe with his swollen lips and his eyes, the blue almost swallowed up by pupil now, and all the skin taut over muscles and how he’s looking at Tyson like he’s the only person in the world.

“What do you want?” Gabe asks, and Tyson almost snorts, because he doesn’t have an answer to that. “We can—what do you want me to do?” he asks, and it sounds almost like a plea. “What’ll make you feel good?”

“I don’t—” Everything. Nothing. It’s too much.

“You have to say. I can’t—I don’t want to make—” he cuts off as Tyson shakes his head. He can’t. If he starts thinking about that then he’ll have to start thinking about everything, and he doesn’t want that. Gabe swallows, and his thumbs rub against Tyson’s hipbone. “Can I fuck you?” he asks, a little hoarse, then chuckles when Tyson nods with plenty of enthusiasm. Yes. That sounds good. That sounds like something he knows how to do.

“Good,” Gabe says on a breath, then, “You’re so good, fuck,” he keeps going, spreading Tyson’s legs wider, his eyes hungry as Tyson gets harder. “Where’s your lube and shit?”

“I don’t have any,” Tyson manages. Gabe stares, less hungrily and more incredulously.

“Really? You?”

“I haven’t exactly been in a great place for random hook ups,” Tyson points out, testy now. “You know why.” Gabe’s incredulous stare flickers, fades into something that definitely isn’t lust, is something sadder.

Then he flicks his head back, like he’s clearing it. “Hotel might have something,” he says, always with the plan, and gets up to go to the minibar. He’s still wearing his sweatpants, somehow, but Tyson still ogles as he goes, because—well. Because. “Otherwise…”

“I’m sure Josty and Comphy have some,” Tyson points out, trying for a straight face.

Gabe turns to look at Tyson, looking the very picture of offended dignity. “I’m not getting lube from Josty.” He opens the minibar, then gives a little cry of triumph. “Got it.”

“Great, two points for you,” Tyson drawls, and Gabe turns around. Any of that weird sadness is gone; now he’s just looking at Tyson like he’s a score that he has to plan to get.

He stalks forward, crawls onto the bed, back between Tyson’s legs, then he leans over and kisses Tyson again, another kiss that Tyson gets lost in, until he’s sinking back into the sheets and Gabe is smirking at him again.

“Gimme, I can—” Tyson starts to suggest, reaching out for the little box Gabe had retrieved, but Gabe shakes his head.

“I want to,” he says, and opens the kit, shakes out the lube and two condoms. He kisses Tyson again, then he’s back between Tyson’s legs, nipping at his thighs. “Just focus on me,” he tells Tyson, then there’s a finger circling his rim and—Tyson doesn’t have a choice, there’s nothing else in the world other than Gabe, how Gabe opens him up slow and teasing and so clever always, playing Tyson like he might pick a lock, murmuring endearments and praise and things Tyson only half hears, because he’s too caught up in everything else.

Then—“Is that enough?” Gabe asks, and Tyson babbles out something about how it definitely is because he needs it, needs more, and then Gabe’s fingers are gone and Gabe’s kicking off his sweatpants and then he’s back, sliding into Tyson and Tyson whines, his hands fisting in the sheets as Gabe’s mouth goes a little slack.

“God, _Tyson_ ,” Gabe breathes, and Tyson would agree but he doesn’t have the breath to do it. Instead, Gabe starts to move, and Tyson rocks into him with it, and that’s all there is, definitely, all Tyson knows, is him and Gabe and them together and the heat in him, as Gabe fucks him so fucking slow and hard until Tyson’s nothing more than need and Gabe’s name—and then Gabe’s hand wraps around his dick, and Gabe’s voice is tight and as needy as Tyson’s when he grits out, “Come on, Tyson, can you come for me?” and Tyson’s never really been able to say no to Gabe even if he wanted to, and Gabe’s hand is hot on his dick and he’s fucking into Tyson just right and everything washes over him until there’s nothing left and it all breaks, and Gabe’s fucking him through it and then he’s coming too, moaning Tyson’s name.

The endorphins crest over Tyson, knock everything else out. Vaguely, he registers Gabe pulling out, then him leaving, and the water running. Tyson’s buzzing too well, though, can feel the orgasm tingling in every nerve, can feel it making him dumb and sleepy and warm.

Then Gabe’s back, with a washcloth, wiping soft and gentle over Tyson’s stomach. Tyson watches through hooded eyes, as Gabe goes about his task, as he glances up every so often, to look at Tyson. Every time he does, his eyes light up, and he smiles to himself.

Then he throws the washcloth aside, rearranges the blankets so somehow Tyson’s under them. It’s a good thing, too—he’s falling asleep. His brain’s the sort of blur that makes it easy. “Good?” Gabe asks, which is a ridiculous question but Tyson smiles at him anyway, and Gabe’s glowing, like he always is in Tyson’s mind.

“Yeah,” Tyson murmurs, and the last thing that registers before he sleeps is Gabe’s finger, tracing gently over the curve of his lips.

///

Tyson wakes to someone gently shaking his shoulder. “Tyson,” Gabe says, low and a little regretful. “Tyson, wake up. It’s time to go.”

He yawns. It’s—“What time’s it?” he mutters, trying to wake up, his brain still fuzzy. It’s an almost unfamiliar sensation.

“Eight,” Gabe tells him, and he’s got that same regretful tone as he goes on, “I let you sleep as long as I could, but you’ve really got to get up now.”

Reluctantly, Tyson opens his eyes—and Gabe’s just there, hovering over him, his lips curved into a smile.

Tyson closes his eyes again. Pinches himself surreptitiously. If he’s dreaming, this might be the cruelest dream he’s had.

“Tyson,” Gabe says again, “You’re not dreaming, but we really do have to go. You need to be in position in a few hours.”

Right. It’s not just Gabe and the ache in Tyson’s thighs and the way Gabe’s looking at his collarbone that makes Tyson think he hasn’t been subtle. It’s everything else too. Go time.

“I’m awake,” Tyson informs him, and tries to stretch, even though Gabe’s thigh is right there. He’s already in his suit, so he really must have let Tyson sleep. It isn’t really helping the whole possible-dream situation. He takes a second’s stock. “I am awake,” he says, more incredulous than anything. “How long did I sleep?”

“Five hours?” Gabe guesses. “You were really out.”

“That’s more than I’ve gotten for a while.” Tyson sits up, and Gabe’s gaze flicks down his chest as the blankets fall away from him. He looks very pleased with himself. “Thanks.” Gabe’s lips twitch. “I mean—not like, thanks for fucking me, or sort of yeah, thanks for fucking me, because I—”

Tyson stops talking, mainly because Gabe’s kissing him again. It’s different in the morning light, somehow, when Tyson’s not so tired, not caught in his cycle of anxiety. It’s just Gabe kissing him, slow and thorough and appreciative, and Tyson sighs into it, melting more than a little. Gabe’s a really good kisser. He’s not surprised.

“Get ready,” Gabe tells him, a whisper away from his lips. He’s bright, lit up, like the morning sun’s filled him with energy. “We’ve got a game to run.” He ducks in, kisses Tyson again, harder, then steps back, straightens. “I’ve got to go talk with Nate. You’re good to go?”

Tyson’s still a little dazed, if he’s being honest, but, “Yeah,” he says vaguely, and Gabe grins at him.

“Good,” he says, then heads out the door.

Tyson takes a breath, and goes to shower.

He knows he’s not dreaming. His dreams aren’t like this—the things he dreams about are things that happened, or real possibilities, and he never thought Gabe was that. And as he showers, the evidence is unmistakable, the beard burn on his cheeks, the marks on his chest—the bruising on the insides of this thighs. It’s clear. He really did sleep with Gabe Landeskog last night. Gabe kissed him again this morning, and not the sort of kiss that’s a ‘this was fun but never again.’

It’s not something he’d ever really imagined happening, in those long years of loving Gabe, and wishing he didn’t love Gabe. His unrequited love had always been a constant, a fact of life. Something he tried to resist, maybe, but that was on him. It was never something that could be requited. Never something that Gabe could return. It had been years, after all, years of them both knowing what Tyson wanted, and Gabe politely, kindly ignoring it.

It had been years, Tyson thinks again, running a hand over the bruises on his chest. Years, and now—this? Now Gabe does this? Now, when Tyson knows he’s not at his most attractive—when he is, frankly, more of a mess than he’s ever been. And especially last night, when Tyson was spiraling, and Gabe had told him exactly what he needed to hear.

The water’s hot around him, too hot, so he turns it down, but it doesn’t drive away that thought. Gabe had told him what he needed to hear, because it’s what Gabe does. He’s a con, and he knows what people need. He knew what Tyson needed, to get into a place where he could do the job—or he thought he knew, because Tyson would have been fine. But Gabe had asked him if he was good to go, this morning, and—had that been what it was? Had it been another play in Gabe’s game?

Tyson rinses out his hair, and breathes. He doesn’t want to think it of Gabe. Five years ago, he wouldn’t have. Would have thought their friendship was enough for Gabe not to use him like he used his marks. But he’d been proven wrong before.

The water’s still too hot. He turns the temperature down again. It doesn’t help his breathing. Fuck, he really doesn’t want to think Gabe would be that cruel, not to him, but—but why else would he do it? Tyson’s not kidding himself, and he knows why people want him, why they might, on the surface, want to sleep with him, but Gabe knows him more than that. Gabe knows what he did. How could anyone really want him, after that? How can he trust Gabe, after that?

He gives up on the shower, and gets dressed. Key part of being in the van means he doesn’t have to dress up, so he just pulls on jeans and a sweatshirt and declares himself good to go.

Then he stares in the mirror another moment. He’s pale, but the sweatshirt covers any marks from last night, and looking at him he seems calm. It’s not like he has a choice, any more. He’s in it. He just—won’t fuck up this time. He won’t let himself.

He nods to himself, then goes to Nate’s suite.

They’re not all there—Comphy’s already at work, and some of the rest of the guys have to be in position, but Nate’s there, reviewing some last minute details, and Gabe’s there, ostensibly reviewing them too but also clearly making a nuisance of himself, and Josty’s there, also making a nuisance of himself towards Kerfy, and EJ’s there, looking mostly asleep on the couch.

Tyson looks them all over, then goes to join Josty, who generally looks like he’s having the most fun and making enough noise that Tyson being quiet won’t be an issue.

It works and it doesn’t—Josty’s definitely loud enough for two Tysons, clearly hyped up and ready to go, and Kerfy’s not much better, honestly. It’s cute; it makes Tyson remember what it was like, when he went into a job like that. It also makes him remember why he doesn’t, why his fingers are drumming against his thigh and he can’t stop fidgeting. He wants this over with. He wants it to start. He wants to stop knowing where Gabe is at all times and watching him look at Tyson, not at all subtle, and how he smiles when he does, smug and pleased and that same weird that Tyson’s still not sure of. He wishes Gabe wasn’t still dressed in a suit, wasn’t being all sharp and prepared and good at what he does. He wishes he knew what Gabe was doing.

Then they all go downstairs, and to the van, which Tyson drives even though Willy likes to whine that he’s the driver, but he’s touching Tyson’s van over his dead body. Nate sits up in front with him, as everyone else crowds in the back and Tyson yells at them not to touch his shit because it’s better than focusing on what’s going to happen. What if he fucks up again?

He slides into his parking spot for the first phase, and throws the van into park. “Last stop, everyone out!” He calls, but he doesn’t get the groans he’d half-expected. Everyone’s in game time, now.

He climbs into the back. Everyone else gets out, until it’s just him, Nate, and Gabe in the van.

He and Nate just look at each other, because that’s all they need—because Tyson knows that Nate believes in him, Nate’s always believed in him, utterly and without question, even when he definitely did not deserve it, but it’s a comfort now. If someone like Nate believes in him, he must be okay. Then Nate nods, and Tyson grins, then Nate grins, and claps Tyson on the shoulder. “See you later,” he says, and gets out.

Then it’s just him and Gabe, who’s hunched over but still somehow managing to look down at him, and he looks warm and sincere, but it’s Gabe. He’s going to go out there, and lie a lot. “You okay?” he asks, and Tyson somehow manages to shrug and nod at once. “You’re okay,” Gabe says, a statement this time. His hand ghosts over Tyson’s arm, down his waist, settles light as a feather on his hip. “You’ll get us there,” he says, and smiles, hopeful and sweet, and it’s everything Tyson wanted pointed at him and fuck he wishes he could trust it.

He opens his mouth. Finds, “Don’t get arrested,” somewhere in him, only half-joking, and Gabe laughs, and leans in, kisses Tyson quick and hard.

“Promise,” he tells him, then gets out of the van.

Tyson gives himself thirty seconds to press his hand to his lips, then sits down in front of his screens. He can’t think about any of that now. Now, they’ve got a heist to pull off.

///

Things go into motion. Nate and EJ join Comphy up on the hill, start setting up. Kerfy, Josty, and Gabe get the real diamonds in a pretty gorgeous series of lifts. Tyson sits in the van and watches everything, as everything ticks along, smooth as clock work. It’s a joy to watch, to feel—as Tyson cues everything along, slips in around the security and gets his boys where they need to go, watches them work, watches them fool everyone, as it starts to buzz in him, the rush of adrenaline.

Then—“Wait, no,” Mikko says, fast and frantic into the comms, “Something’s wrong.”

“I knew it,” Tyson mutters, to the no one in his van, and firmly tells his hands to stop shaking. Nothing ever goes smoothly. Nate and Gabe can make all their plans but at the end of the day, something always goes wrong. Tyson’s been doing this basically since he was born, and has heard all his dad’s stories, and he knows that much. Everything always goes right, until it all goes wrong.

“What’s wrong?” Gabe asks. On a screen, Tyson can see him sitting in the lobby, a hat that should look douchey pulled over his eyes. It does look douchy, but it looks significantly less douchy on him than it would on anyone else. “Rants—”

“Roy is doing it again, he’s not—fuck, someone spilled a drink on him,” Mikko says, and Tyson’s switching through cameras, fast, because—there he is. Patrick Roy, and Mikko a shadow in the corner, ready to do his drop, except Roy is standing and yelling at a waiter who looks terrified, and the waiter is pawing at his jacket trying to wipe up whatever it is, and Roy is shoving him away and yelling and storming out of the restaurant. “He’s going somewhere else, he’s not going to be here for the drop.”

“Tys, where’s he going?”

“I’m not—looks like his room,” Tyson says. “He’s going to the private elevator.”

“Shit.” Gabe hums. “No way we can delay it?”

“It’s on a totally different system, I can’t get in without a hardwire link.”

“What if we let him leave?” Nate adds. He’s on the hill, working on the other half of the job; Tyson has fewer cameras there but he sees the blinking blue dot of the tracker on Nate’s comm, comfortingly steady on his map, next to the red dot that’s Comphy and the green one that’s EJ. “We’re almost done here.”

“If we let him leave, without dropping the fakes, insurance will replace everything and he won’t get hit at all,” Gabe snaps. “Okay. New plan. Josty, you’re going to put it in the safe.”

“Sick!” Up on the roof, Josty bounces to his feet, starts limbering out his arms. Tyson twists in his seat, running the numbers.

“Mikko, drop it on the window ledge, Josty, pick it up,” Gabe orders. “Then you can go down and put the fakes in the safe, and it’ll look like he stashed it away instead of having it on him, that’ll work.”

Nate hums. “Should go. Kerfy, you’re set?”

“The real diamonds are in place,” Kerfy says, from the hall where he’s waiting. “I’m good to go when Gabe is.”

“Okay, then let’s—”

“No,” Tyson interrupts. “Wait, no.”

“What?” Gabe asks, not quite harsh but curt, ready to go.

“It’s not going to work. EJ’s going to do his thing on the hill and kill the power, and the safe room’s going to lock and drain the air.”

“Then override it,” Gabe tells him, impatient. “You’ve been cleaning up after Josty and Comphy for days. We’ve only got—”

“I don’t know if I can. This is—do you know how complicated this is?” This safe is state of the art, if not the most complicated thing Tyson’s worked with, and Tyson’s been looking at it but not for this, not particularly, he could have missed something. “I’ve only scratched the surface, and I don’t know if there’s any hardware I don’t know about, and—”

 “Tyson,” Gabe cuts in, “Do you have it?”

“I don’t know, maybe, but I can’t—” Tyson’s moving as fast as he can but he doesn’t know he didn’t do everything he can’t if Josty’s hurt he can’t do this he doesn’t—

“We don’t have to,” Nate interrupts. “We can just take the diamonds and go. Or just frame someone else. It doesn’t have to be Roy.”

“It has to!” Gabe argues back, and no one in that room, all the saps who don’t know what’s going on, they wouldn’t be able to see it, but Tyson can see the tension in his shoulders at a glance, which is all he spares himself. “Tys, I need you to do this,” he says, and he’s said that before.

Tyson’s hands freezes. He hopes his ragged breath isn’t audible over the comms. Fuck, he can’t do this now. He can’t. He has to be able to keep everyone safe and the job moving, and that means he should be able to do this, and not think about—

_“Tyson, I need you do this, I know it’s not the plan but you’re the only one who can,” and a smile, and then—_

“Fuck. No. I didn’t—” Gabe’s deep breath is audible. “Can you do it, Tyson? It’s your call.”

“But no pressure,” Tyson jokes, but he’s looking at the screens. At all his crew, scattered across them, waiting for him. At Gabe, who glances up, at the camera, so he’s looking at Tyson, and he’s tense and waiting but he doesn’t look angry. He looks like he’s ready to hear either answer. Like he’d listen to it. Or maybe like he thinks Tyson’s answer is a foregone conclusion.

“Tyson,” Nate says, prompting, gentle, and Tyson closes his eyes, bites at his lip. He knows that safe. He’s been in the security around it for weeks. He should be able to do it, but he can’t be reckless either, not anymore. He just—

“No,” he says, and watches as Gabe nods, slowly.

“Okay,” he says. He still doesn’t look angry. Or no, he looks angry, but not disappointed, which would be worse. Still, Tyson doesn’t want to look at him, so he looks back at the safe room camera. He’s been messing with it for days, why can’t he do this one little thing? He should be able to do _something._ If… “Then, we’ll see about framing someone else, we can—”

“No, wait,” Tyson interrupts again. He leans in. Switches his screens to where he’s been working with the safe, and then pulls up the blueprints, fast.

“We don’t have time, if we’re going to change—”

“Shut up, Gabriel, I’m being brilliant,” Tyson tells him, and EJ snorts, suddenly. “We can do it.”

“If you don’t think you can—”

“I’m not going to override the blackout protocol. I’m going to trigger it early.”

“What?” comes a number of different voices, but Tyson’s going, because fuck, yes, this is going to work. He might not know plans but he knows his tech, and this he can do.

“I’m going to do the blackout protocol early, when Josty’s outside. From the inside that’s lockdown, but from the outside—”

“It’s just a door,” Nate finishes.

“Which I can pick,” Josty puts in. “Right?”

“Right,” Tyson agrees.

“And the blackout thing won’t retrigger when EJ sets it off?” Comphy demands. “It won’t like, reset or something?”

“I—” He doesn’t _know_. There should be evidence that it would on the plans, there should be evidence of those modifications somewhere, it’s not like Roy to pay more for anything, but he’d thought he’d known before, and he’d been wrong, but he’s almost sure—“I’m not certain, but I really don’t think so.”

“Is the risk worth it?” Gabe asks, and he looks at the camera again.

Tyson swallows. Thinks of four years ago, and what it had felt like knowing what could go wrong as he pressed that button, and Gabe’s smile so he did it anyway. Gabe’s not smiling now.

“Yes,” he says, and it hurts, and everything in him is shaking. “It shouldn’t double trigger.”

“Okay. Josty?”

“Yeah, I’m off.” Josty lands, light as a cat, on one of the hotel floor hall’s carpets, dusts himself off, and starts sauntering downstairs. “I—”

 “You’re not doing it,” Comphy interrupts.

“You don’t get to say that,” Gabe snaps back, and Tyson can see him bristling, but he’s busy making sure he didn’t just kill Josty, and he can’t think about that— “Josty—”

“No,” Comphy says again, and he sounds firm but young. “No, you could suffocate, don’t—”

Tyson’s the only one who can see Josty’s face, but his eyes are wide in surprise. “It’ll be okay.”

“What if it’s not?” Comphy demands, and Tyson’s trying, but he doesn’t know, and there’s—fuck, why hadn’t he thought of this, he should have known, he should have been prepared for this, now if he fucks this up Josty’s going to suffocate— “I can’t—”

“JT,” Josty says, and he sounds softer than Tyson’s ever heard him. “I’ll see you after, eh?”

“Tyson,” JT breathes, and Tyson feels weirdly voyeuristic, hearing his name said like that to someone who isn’t him.  “I—”

“You know you’re on public comms, right?” EJ cuts in. “T minus ten, Jost. Get going.”

Josty grins, and goes. Tyson half watches as he works, frantic—as he and Mikko do the handoff, smooth as freshly polished ice; as he goes down, down. As he gets to the hall outside the safe room. The door looks innocuous, which is most of the point—that you don’t notice the risk starts here.

“I’m in place,” Josty says.

“Okay. Tyson?” Gabe prompts.

“EJ?” Tyson asks. “We set?”

“T minus one,” EJ tells him, and Tyson nods to himself, and triggers the program. Nothing happens on the outside, but inside, a red light comes on, and somewhere an alarm is about to start. “You’re good,” he tells Josty, who pulls out his lockpicks. “Twenty seconds before it’ll reboot and seal.”

It’s a simple lock. Josty gets it open, then he’s inside--

Tyson’s too far away to hear the explosion, but he knows when it hits because the cameras all go dark, and even expecting it there are a few gasps on the comms. Tyson ignores them.

“Josty?” He demands, a beat behind Comphy’s, “Tyson?”

There’s another beat, and Tyson can’t—he did this, this one’s on him, it’s indisputably on him, he said he could and if he was wrong, then—

“I’m good,” Josty says, and Tyson slumps back into his chair. “Fuck, it’s dark, though.”

“That’s why it’s called a blackout, dumbass,” Kerfy tells him, his voice tight with relief, and Tyson starts to laugh.

///

They all make their way back to the hotel separately—there’s no need to draw attention by everyone coming back to the van—and he’s already in a car, so it takes Tyson less time than the others to get back. Only Mikko’s back, actually, when he’s there, drumming his fingers and looking impatient and excited.

Tyson gets it. He grins at him, then glances down at his phone. He can see the dots that are the earpieces, slowly converging—can count them, if he wants. All of them. Hale and whole.

The room fills up. EJ comes in, dusty but grinning and clearly hyped up by the strength of his explosives; Nate and Comphy aren’t far behind him, and Tyson immediately finds his way to Nate because that needs a hug. Nate hugs him back, lets Tyson rest his forehead against Nate’s solid chest.

“Okay?” Nate asks, and Tyson—that’s a complicated question.

“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t think he’s lying. Then, because this isn’t the time for that, he pulls his head back and lets the very real glee come through. “We did it!”

“We did!” Nate agrees, and he’s grinning too, and he looks years younger. He looks like he’s trying and failing to be serious when he adds, “And no one even got a little exploded.”

“Was it close?”

“No,” EJ puts in, looking a little offended. “I don’t explode people.” He pauses, then. “Not on accident.” 

Tyson and Nate both blink. “Anyway,” Tyson says loudly, because that was ominous, and EJ’s grin as he said it didn’t make it any less so, “No one exploded or suffocated or caught on fire or got arrested, so we’re doing much better than last time. Well, no one got arrested yet, I guess. Not everyone’s back yet.”

He looks at his phone. Nate cranes over to look at it too. Everyone is still moving. “Roy shouldn’t get dinged for a few hours, and we’ll be gone by then,” Nate says, his hand comforting on Tyson’s shoulder. “Lauren will pick it up then. We did it. We’re home free.” He takes a breath, then, “I’m glad you were here with us. I know I kind of got you into it and you weren’t really ready, and you haven’t been okay, but—I’m glad it was you.”

Tyson looks out at his crew, and the adrenaline racing through him and the way he thinks he could on the world right now, that fix that he’s been chasing his whole life, that he thought he could let go of. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

“I—” Nate starts, but then the door opens, with the sort of dramatic bang that definitely means it’s Josty.

It is Josty, looking dusty in his sneaking ensembles of dark jeans and dark shirt, and elated and riding the same high as the rest of them. “Hey, man of the hour!” Nate starts, but Josty doesn’t stop moving, just lets the door close behind him and walks right to Comphy, who’s staring at him somewhere between surprise and relief and warmth.

“Tys—” Comphy starts, but Josty doesn’t stop then, just wraps his arms around Comphy and pulls him into the sort of dramatic kiss that really needs swelling background music.

Tyson wolf-whistles, because he doesn’t know how not to be a dick, and it’s looking like if they aren’t reminded that other people are there things might start to get inappropriate. Nate elbows him.

“Stop it,” he mutters, and Tyson shrugs.

“Look, if you don’t want them to stop—I mean, sure, it’d be hot, but—”

Someone else comes up next to him, and Tyson knows the scent of him before he registers that Gabe’s by his side. “Be quiet,” Gabe murmurs, and his whole body is hot against Tyson’s side and easy in Tyson’s space, and Tyson goes still because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Josty and Comphy are ignoring them anyway, and they do pull apart before things get inappropriate.

“This is stupid,” Josty announces, as Comphy just stares at him. If Tyson had any room to move, he would definitely be pulling up background music on his phone. “You can’t say shit like that and still have it be casual.”

“I—you were the one who likes things casual!” Comphy protests, his hand still firmly on Josty’s hip. “That’s what you do, I didn’t want—”

“Yeah, but not with you,” Josty cuts him off, rolling his eyes like it’s obvious. “You’re—” Then he stops, and for maybe the first time, Tyson sees Josty looking shy. “You’re different.”

“Oh.” Comphy’s eyes widen. “ _Oh_. So, you—”

“No duh,” Josty snaps, and smiles, and Comphy’s cheeks are as red as his hair but his smile could light up a small city. “And you—”

“No duh,” Comphy echoes, mocking but so fond. Josty blinks, and for a second, everything he feels is written on his face—all the love. Then he grabs Comphy by the wrist.

“Don’t get us until we need to go,” he announces to the room, and doesn’t so much drag Comphy off as they both hurry themselves off.

Kerfy stares after the closing door. “They’re really going to be insufferable now,” he says, and despite how mournful he sounds his lips are twitching upwards.

Nate sighs with the same performative annoyance. “I’m going to have to rearrange the travel plans to give them a honeymoon,” he agrees.

“Maybe they’ll be done by then?” Tyson suggests. Kerfy shakes his head.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” he says, then, “Anyone have a drink?”

“Yes!” Tyson agrees, and pulls away from Gabe. He’s too warm and too close and Tyson’s already buzzing from the job, he can’t resist that too. He wants to ride this a while longer. He doesn’t want to think about what last night meant. “Someone get this man a drink. And maybe some ear plugs.”

It sets everyone off, and the quiet Josty’s arrival brought diffuses as everyone starts to circulate and talk and compare what happened and enthuse about how awesome they were. Tyson lets it wash over him, lets himself circle, lets it carry him up and up and up. He’s missed this. God, he’s missed it so much, and he doesn’t know how he lasted without it, and it’s terrifying him because he made the right call today but what if he hadn’t?

Somehow, he ends up outside on the balcony, leaning against the railing and looking out at the mountains. Usually he’d be inside with all that noise and his friends, but he needed air.

“Hey,” Gabe says, coming up next to him. He leans against the railing next to Tyson, their forearms brushing.

Tyson raises his eyebrows. “Brilliant opening line there.”

Gabe smiles, slow and charming and a con. “I could give you a line,” he murmurs, and Tyson shakes his head.

“Don’t,” he warns. He can’t—is that what Gabe’s doing? Now that he’s done, that the job is done, that he’s done what Gabe needed him to do, are they going to drop back into their old routine where Gabe flirts and doesn’t mean it? Or will Gabe keep sleeping with him because otherwise he’s worried he might stop again? Or is it something else, something real? Gabe had let him make the choice today—had asked him—but he almost hadn’t. There’s no job anymore. Tyson can’t not think about it.

Gabe’s smile drops, and he nods too. “I’m happy for Comphy and Josty,” he says instead. “It’s about time they figured it out.”

“Yeah.” Tyson agrees. “Though I guess it was good for us, in the end. If I hadn’t had to mess around with the safe so much then I wouldn’t have known how to reprogram it today.”

“You’d have figured it out,” Gabe states, and Tyson makes a noise that he thinks is disagreeing. “You’d have figured out something, Tyson. I don’t know where you have this idea you’ve ever let us down, but you never have. Messing up isn’t letting us down.”

“It’s close enough,” Tyson counters, then, because he can’t do this, “What are you doing out here, Gabe?” 

Gabe takes a long breath, then he turns, so his hip is propped against the railing and he can look at Tyson.  He’s magnetic, like he always is. But more than that, he’s—he’s looking at Tyson like he meant what he said, that he believed Tyson could do what he had to. Like he cares about him.

“Nate’s rearranging our scatter plans so Josty and Comphy are going together.”

“I don’t think that’s out of choice, really. I think they might throw a fit if they’re separated,” Tyson points out. “Or might just not go. They’re definitely good enough to stow away. It’s probably best for—”

“Come with me,” Gabe interrupts, and Tyson goes still all at once. 

“What?”

“Come with me,” Gabe repeats. He’s not leaning in, drawing Tyson in with his con’s smile and his voice dropping; he’s just saying it, matter of fact, and watching Tyson like it’ll give something away. “When we scatter. We’ll go somewhere warm, and you can drink all the fruity drinks you want and lie around in the sun and we can fuck on the beach and scam rich tourists out of their wallets and do whatever we want.”

Tyson can’t breathe. “Comphy and Josty are going together because they’re in love,” he points out, trying to be even, but his voice cracks on the last word.

Gabe doesn’t look away from him. “I know.”

Tyson should be jumping at this. This is all Tyson would have wanted for years; Gabe telling him, in his roundabout way, that he loves him, that he wants him, that they’ll run away together. Tyson had fantasies about just that. He still wants it, because it’s Gabe, and he hadn’t backed away from the mess that Tyson’s become, because he’s been bringing Tyson the coffee that he likes, because he’s never not believed in Tyson. Because Tyson will always be in love with Gabe Landeskog, and after this long, that seems like a fact. 

But—Gabe doesn’t look like he’s trying to con Tyson, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t. It doesn’t mean he isn’t using Tyson again. It doesn’t mean he won’t use Tyson again. It doesn’t mean Tyson can handle that, even if Gabe doesn’t mean to use him. It doesn’t mean Tyson can handle anything, because he’s still a mess and he knows it, and one job doesn’t mean anything, really. He spent four years avoiding thinking about it because he didn’t have to. The job just gave him another excuse. 

Tyson looks back out over the mountains, and thinks about his quiet lake, and what it felt like to be able to breathe. “I can’t,” he says, and Gabe’s face falls. Something in Tyson is pleased about that, but more of him isn’t—he doesn’t want to hurt Gabe, really. He just wants not to hurt himself. “I need to go home, and like, think about—all of this. Think about if I can trust you.”

“I can go with you, then—”

“And I can’t think when you’re here,” Tyson goes on, over him. “You’re too—too much is wrapped up into you. I need to do my thinking alone.”

Gabe opens his mouth like he’s going to argue again, then he closes his. Swallows, like he’s swallowing down words. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds like it hurts but he’s saying it anyway. “You’ll let me know, when you figure it out?”

Tyson’s not sure what it means, that Gabe’s giving in. “Sure,” he agrees, and Gabe smiles like it hurts.

“Then I’ll wait,” he decides, and pushes up off the railing. “I guess it’s my turn.”

“What does that—” By Gabe just smirks, and goes back inside. Tyson rolls his eyes at the mountains. Of course Gabe’s going to be dramatic and frustrating. He doesn’t know what else he could have expected.

///

They start to scatter a few hours later—their planes and trains and buses and cars leave at different times, so they trickle off, to wherever they’re going. Tyson leaves somewhere in the middle, with hugs all around, a promise to call Nate as soon as he’s home, and a promise to send EJ some specs once he’s finished playing with them. Gabe doesn’t say anything much as he leaves, but he just _looks_ at him, so Tyson can fill in the rest.

Then he’s gone, and he takes a plane to New Orleans then a bus to Miami then he takes a plane back up to Canada, and then a car out of Vancouver, and then there it is—his lake, and his house with its big glass windows, all welcoming him home.

///

Time passes. Tyson had forgotten, down in Colorado, how it did that—how it goes on and nothing changes. How excitement dulls into ease. Tyson steps back into the projects he’d left behind to go south. He watches the grass start to spring up on his lawn and watches the money appear in his bank account and follows the news and Lauren’s updates about how Roy had been caught stealing irreplaceable jewelry from his most important resort guests. He upgrades people’s security and checks to make sure no one’s tripped any alarms and smiles despite himself at the selfie Josty sends them all, him and Comphy on a beach somewhere.

And he thinks, maybe despite himself—about how he could be on a beach too, sending pictures of him with Gabe wrapped around his back like he gets when he’s a little tipsy. He can’t avoid thinking about it, not anymore. Not when he knows Gabe’s out there.

And he dreams, too. The nightmares haven’t gone away. He doesn’t think they’ll ever go away, because there are some things he’s going to have to live with. But he is sleeping easier, a little. More, at least. Not as well as he had that night with Gabe, but well enough.

And sometimes—he gives in, and follows Gabe’s credit cards, his phone, all the little things he can find. Gabe knows how to really go off the grid if he wants to; he’s leaving these on purpose, Tyson knows. To show he’s waiting.

Tyson’s waiting too, he thinks, as March fades to April fades to May fades to June and he still hasn’t done anything. He’s not sure what for. For a sign, that he can trust Gabe? He’s not sure what that sign would be. It’s well known that he doesn’t have good judgment with things concerning Gabe. At least like this, he’s not hurting anyone.

He goes down to the lake one night in early June. It’s still chilly, but it’s finally warm enough that he can justify getting in, and he’s been here four years, he can handle it. It’s nice, anyway. To float on his back and watch the stars come out, to feel himself drift. He can put everything else aside here; can almost stop thinking and just let the chill of the water seeping in through his skin and his hair and the stars spread out above him remind him how little it all matters, in the end. It’s easy, like this.

“Tyson!” He can barely hear it with his ears underwater, but then there it is again—“Tyson!”

He lifts his head—and of course, there’s Gabe, standing on the dock and glaring at Tyson with all the thunder he’s capable of.

Tyson, half because he’s surprised and half because he can’t think of anything else to do, goes underwater.

When he surfaces again, Gabe is right on the edge of the dock, and definitely looking like he’s considering jumping in. “Tyson!” Gabe snaps again. “What are you doing?”

Tyson looks around. “Swimming? If you don’t know what swimming looks like, I have some other questions—”

“It’s freezing. You’re going to drown.”

Tyson rolls his eyes, but he swims over to the dock. “I’m really not.”

“You might.” Gabe leans down, grabs Tyson’s forearm as soon as it’s practical to drag him out. “You’re freezing.”

“Yeah, because I just got out of the water, but it’s summer,” Tyson points out, but he lets Gabe throw the towel he’d brought down—because he’s not an idiot—over him. “What are you doing?”

“Making sure you don’t drown, apparently,” Gabe tells him, “What were you thinking?”

“That I wanted to go swimming,” Tyson retorts. “What were you thinking?”

“That you were lying in freezing cold water not moving,” Gabe snaps back, and—well, okay. Fine. Maybe that’s an okay reason for him to look like that and to fuss like that.

“Well, I’m fine,” Tyson retorts, and Gabe snorts.

“Yeah. You’ve said.” His arms are rubbing up and down Tyson’s arms, like he’s trying to warm him up, which is working, for sure. “Why the hell were you swimming?”

“Because I wanted to. And its summer.”

“It’s not summer yet.”

“It’s like three days away, stop being dramatic.” Tyson eyes Gabe. “Aren’t you from Sweden? Isn’t that like, in the Arctic?”

“And we know better than to swim in freezing water,” Gabe replies. “We should go inside. You can—”

“No,” Tyson interrupts, and Gabe stops, then suddenly seems to realize how close he’s standing to Tyson, how he’s just manhandled him out of the lake and basically into his arms, and his hands fall slack and away from Tyson. “No, I’m fine. Gabe. You’re here.”

“Yeah.” Gabe steps back, and Tyson actually looks, for the first time. He looks—good. Tanned. Put together as always in his tight jeans and warm-looking sweater. Less tense than the last time Tyson had seen him, then the job, like he’s eaten and put on the sort of muscle that doesn’t come from a prison gym. Like he’s not running on adrenaline and revenge anymore. “I am.”

Tyson blinks, but he doesn’t disappear. “What happened to waiting?”

Gabe shrugs, a little sheepish. “I got impatient.” Tyson snorts—of fucking course—and Gabe hurries on. “Wait, no. I didn’t—I’ll go if you tell me to. I will. I just wanted to talk.”

“You talking is sort of the whole problem,” Tyson informs him. He turns to grab the sweatshirt he’d brought with him, tugs it on. “You’re too good at it.”

“Then let me do some more,” Gabe says, and he’s looking at Tyson like—like he did in Vail. “Please? I just have something to say. Then I’ll go.”

Tyson crosses his arms over his chest, like that’s going to protect him against Gabe. “Fine.”

Gabe looks at him a second more, like he’s waiting for Tyson to say more than that, but when it’s clear Tyson’s not, he takes a breath. “Roy’s done. You must have seen, but—even if they can’t end up proving anything, he’s totally discredited. No one’s ever going to do business with him again. He’s ruined.”

Tyson snorts, because of course that’s what Gabe was thinking about. His revenge. “Yeah, I saw. I do have TVs up here. And, you know, the internet. And Lauren. You didn’t have to come up here to tell me that. I also have phones. Multiple ones. Some of which you have the number of.”

“No, that’s not—Roy’s gone, and I thought that would—” Gabe shakes his head, looking dissatisfied. There’s a not-inconsiderable part of Tyson that is enjoying watching him squirm like this, watching him not know what to say. Gabe always knows what to say. But then he looks right at Tyson, and the only thing Tyson can read on his face is determination. He sort of wishes there was more light, so he could see Gabe’s face in more than starlight. He’s sort of glad, that he can’t see the full force of it. 

“I spent four years furious at him,” Gabe begins again. “Plotting my revenge. The revenge we’d take, for putting me in prison. For what he did to us. For the fire. It got me through, thinking how we’d all be back together again, and then we’d take him down.”

“Well, congrats. We did it. Yay!” Tyson adds some jazz hands, for good measure, in case Gabe didn’t get the sarcasm.

Gabe rolls his eyes, his lips twitching just a little. “Yeah, we did it, and—I thought it would feel different.” Gabe shrugs, helpless.

“Okay?”

“It’s not—I mean, he fucking deserved what he got and it felt great seeing it, but—it wasn’t everything I wanted.”

Tyson rolls his eyes again. “Yeah, you’re a thief. I hate to break it to you, Gabe, but we do what we do because we don’t know how not to want more.” Tyson knows, has seen it time and again, how every con keeps trying to fly higher and higher and higher without knowing how to look down—he’s seen his dad break on it. Felt himself break on it. “Nothing’s ever going to be everything. There’s always going to be another job, a bigger one.”

“Not like that.” Gabe takes a step forward, though he’s still carefully an arm’s length away. “It didn’t fix things. Not with us.”

Tyson swallows. “Roy wasn’t what broke things between us.”

“I know,” Gabe says, and Tyson’s eyes go wide. Gabe hadn’t said that before. “I know, I hadn’t—I didn’t mean to hurt you, to get you to do something you didn’t want, but I was angry and reckless and I didn’t think. About what would happen. About how you were—how you felt about me. About what it might do to you.” Tyson can see his Adam’s apple move, then, “I made a horrible choice, and you’ve had to pay for it.”

It should feel better, to hear Gabe say that. To acknowledge that it wasn’t just Tyson, that Tyson wouldn’t have done it if Gabe hadn’t told him to. That Gabe used him.

But Tyson’s still so tired, and it doesn’t really. The words don’t matter. Someone’s still dead, and nothing’s going to change that. Maybe it’s Tyson’s fault alone. Maybe it’s Gabe’s. Maybe it’s Roy’s. Maybe it’s Dutchy’s, for ditching them and making Gabe spin out. Maybe it’s all of theirs. Tyson’s never going to not carry it.

“I could have said no,” he says, because—that’s it, at the end of it. Even as ridiculously infatuated as he’d been, he could have said no.

“You weren’t going to,” Gabe replies, matter-of-fact, and Tyson winces. It always hurts, to be laid bare. But Gabe winces too. “Fuck, I didn’t mean—you didn’t know how bad an idea it was. You knew it could be bad, but not that it would be. Or even that it was likely to be. Because Roy was hiding something none of us thought to look for, and because I didn’t give you time.”

“I still fucked up,” Tyson says, and then he hugs his arms closer around him. “Did you just come here to rehash this? Because trust me, I’m already always thinking about it. You didn’t have to fly all the way up here.” Then it occurs to him. “Is there another job? I still don’t know what I’m doing, I—”

“No,” Gabe cuts him off. “I’m not—this isn’t _for_ anything. I just want to…apologize, I guess.”

“Apologize?” Tyson’s not sure he’s ever heard him do that, for real and not part of a con. “Gabe, what’s the game here?”

“There’s no game.”

“There’s always a game.” Tyson shakes his head. “We’re cons, there’s always a game. What else was you bringing me coffee or whatever? What else was you fucking me?” he asks, and Gabe makes a hurt face. “And asking me to come with you, and—this—it’s all—what is it? What do you want from me?”

“Too much,” Gabe says, and his face is torn open. “Too much, but—Tyson, I’m trying to be careful with you.”

“I’m not going to break,” Tyson snaps at him, because he’s not. He’s more than that. Even if it doesn’t always feel like it. “I don’t need you to be careful with me.”

“But you deserve it anyway,” Gabe retorts, then takes another breath. “You deserve it,” he repeats, softer. “You deserve someone who makes you smile and lifts you up and is careful with your heart.” His voice drops quieter, rawer. “I know I haven’t always been. But I’m trying. I want to be.” He reaches out, but doesn’t touch. “I would like it if you would let me,” he says, careful—not with the smoothness he has in a con, but like he is trying.

Tyson—he looks at Gabe, but that’s too much, how Gabe’s looking back at him, all warmth and desire and a softness Tyson’s not sure he’s ever seen, saying things that Tyson always wanted him to say. So instead he looks back up, at the endless stars.

“I was so in love with you,” he says, slowly too. “For so long. And you didn’t look twice at me, until I was broken, and you needed me fixed.”

“You’re not broken,” Gabe tells him, brilliant and sure. “You might not be fine, but you’re not broken.”

Tyson can’t help his smile at that. It’s nice someone thinks so. “The point stands, though. You didn’t look twice at me until you needed me for something.”

“I was young and stupid.” Tyson can’t see Gabe, but he can hear him shrug. “And—we had all the time in the world then, you remember how it felt.” Tyson shrugs too. It’s probably a good thing, in retrospect. He would have lost himself in Gabe, if something had happened before. He hadn’t known how not to, and Gabe hadn’t known how not to ask him to. “Then—it had been years, Tyson, and everything had changed, and I hadn’t had much in me other than revenge and—I didn’t realize how much it meant to be the person who could always make you smile until I couldn’t anymore.” Gabe makes a low sound that’s almost a laugh. “Do you know what it felt like, when you found that coffee I’d gotten you and you took a sip and you just smiled, probably because you didn’t know it was from me? It was—it was worth the whole score, just for that. To realize I hadn’t lost you completely.”

Tyson turns to look at Gabe, his eyebrows going up. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Gabe replies, looking stubborn. “You are.” He glances down, then back up at Tyson, still stubborn, still determined, still so very magnetic even if he isn’t trying. “I’m not asking you for anything. You can tell me to go away and never talk to you again. You can stay up here forever and I’ll come visit you. We can run away to the Caymans and just retire with some mai tais. We can find Nate and run more jobs. It’s your call.”

Tyson looks out across the lake. His safe lake, with all the easy memories of him and Gabe being young and stupid and not knowing what was coming, with none of the baggage of the rest of the world. Four years he hid here, safe and content and taking no risks. He could send the biggest risk he could take, standing next to him, away, and live out his life here, and never have to make a dangerous choice again.

It’s your call, Gabe said, like he had said down in Vail, and Tyson had made the choice and they’d _won_. He’d done it. He’d told Gabe no and he’d made the right choice and no one had gotten hurt and he hadn’t lost himself and it had felt like everything he’d been missing for four years, like coming home, like flying. Like finally being awake.

Tyson’s a con too, in the end. He’s always wanted more than is good for him.

“Nate has been getting bored,” Tyson says, and looks back at Gabe. Gabe’s lips are curving up as he speaks, incredulous and beautiful. “If we don’t go collect him, Crosby might recruit him for good.”

“We can’t have that,” Gabe agrees, then, that smile still spreading, lighting up his face, “Really?”

Tyson shrugs, but he’s probably smiling too, grinning. “Yeah.”

Gabe jolts forward, closing the distance between them, “Can I, Tys—”

“Fuck, yes, you better,” Tyson babbles, and then he’s cut off by Gabe’s mouth and his hands tight on Tyson’s hips and Tyson loses the rest of the world except for the lapping of the waves and Gabe drawing him in.

They break apart when air becomes a problem, but Gabe’s hands are still on Tyson, not letting him go far, and Tyson’s probably doing something similar, if he could remember what muscles were in the face of the warm, overwhelming fierceness of Gabe’s expression. “I love you,” he says, and Tyson definitely stumbles over nothing at all. “I love you,” Gabe says again, “And I know I haven’t always treated you like that and that you don’t trust it, but I do, and I’ll keep proving it to you until you do believe me.”

Tyson knows his face is bright red, and he can’t handle Gabe saying that. The best place to hide his face, he decides, is definitely Gabe’s neck. “I love you too,” he mumbles into Gabe’s skin. But Gabe definitely heard him, because he can feel him tense, like he’s holding back movement by the skin of his teeth. “I don’t think I know how not to. Even when I didn’t want to.”

“Good,” Gabe says, and then his hand is on Tyson’s face, gently guiding his chin up again. “I won’t give you a reason not to again. I promise.”

“Thief’s honor?” Tyson asks, teasing, and Gabe grins, and seals the promise with another kiss, that Tyson feels to his toes and ends when Tyson accidently stumbles backwards into a deck chair and they both nearly fall into the lake.

“Okay,” Gabe says. “Can we go back up to the house? It’s freezing down here.”

“Am I not warming you up enough?” Tyson retorts, though he’s pretty cold too, if he’s being honest.

“We could do better with a bed. Or a wall,” Gabe adds, thoughtful, and Tyson flushes and nods, probably too fast. “And, well—I do have—”

Tyson knows him too well. “A new job to talk over, yeah, I know.”

“Hey.” Gabe grabs his hand, before he can lean down to pick up the towel he’d dropped at some point in the evening. His face is very serious. “That wasn’t the point—I really would have left. Or stayed, even if you hadn’t wanted to join. I just wanted you.”

“Yeah.” Tyson says. He thinks he’s even starting to believe it.

///

Tyson wakes up sweaty and shaking and still hearing screams, to, “Tyson. C’mon, Tyson, wake up, you’re just dreaming, wake up.”

“I’m up,” Tyson mutters, once he thinks he is enough to speak. He opens his eyes, and Gabe is there, lying next to him in bed and looking worriedly at him, his hair still messy from sleep and what they’d done to get to sleep and his eyes sleepy but concerned. Tyson’s still getting used to it, having Gabe looking like this, in his bed. Well, in his hotel bed, at least, because that’s what they’re doing for the current job in Charlotte.

He’s definitely frowning. “Bad one?”

Tyson shrugs. “Worst in a while.” They aren’t coming as frequently at least, which is something. He doesn’t know if it’s having someone in his bed, having Gabe there, or if he’s like, growing or something. He’d take any of the three.

Gabe hums, and tugs at Tyson, settling him closer. Tyson lets him. It is better, when he can hear Gabe’s heartbeat, remind himself he hasn’t gotten him hurt, at least. That he’s there with Tyson. “Need something? Water?”

Tyson shakes his head, then rests it on Gabe’s shoulder. “I’ll get a head start on the security system for tomorrow. You go back to sleep.”

“I’m not going to just leave—”

“One of us should be well rested,” Tyson points out, because just because he’s still semi-nocturnal doesn’t mean Gabe has to be. And because the easy rhythm of their back and forth can ground him. “Let’s not have Nate yell at us again, please?”

Gabe shudders—that had been uncomfortable for everyone involved—and nods. “Don’t go far?” he asks, instead, a little pleading.

Tyson nods, and rolls over to get his laptop from where it’s sitting next to their bed. He scoots back onto the bed, wiggles up so he can sit enough up on the headboard to rest the computer on his lap, and Gabe’s temple can rest against his hip. “Yeah,” he agrees, and Gabe smiles up at him, soft and sleepy and nowhere near the smile he’ll use tomorrow to charm his way into the CEO’s office. “We’ve got a job to do.”

“Hell yeah we do,” Gabe mumbles, and Tyson starts typing as Gabe mumbles sleepy nonsense next to him. Once it gets to be a real hour in the morning, they’ll go find Nate, and the job will start.  

Tyson brushes his hand over Gabe’s hair against his hip, and keeps picking apart the alarms as the sun starts to rise.

**Author's Note:**

> Liked it? Want to talk about it? Comment or come chat on tumblr at [ fanforthefics!](http://fanforthefics.tumblr.com/)


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